June 1, 2010 - Letter Home

Short and Sweet
  
Hey Family,

So maybe this week there'll be a bit less info. I don't feel very good about that. Because I received some frankly awesome and heartwarming e-mails from my family and I just want to keep passing it forward. Unfortunately, problems with computers and my need this morning to write a monster letter to Presidente necessitates that I go a bit easy on the syrup. Sorry guys.

What was my monster letter to President? Yesterday we had zone conference, and in my interview with President I presented a new idea for something we could do in our district. He told me to forward all the information to him today so that he could analyze it better and get me an answer. What was my idea? Something which the Sacramento, California mission does but here it has been against the rules. It's called a Blitz. All of the Elders in a district go crash in another area and do a huge division with just finding activities. It's supposed to provide a companionship with like, a transfers worth of contacts in one shot. It's also cool because the Elders would get to sleep over and have pizza and stuff that night. It was a huge pain to write out because I needed to prove that doing a Blitz would actually SAVE money instead of wasting it, and after a lot of math I figured that our district would save $150 per transfer doing this. So I sent all the math over to President Pavan. It would be cool if it went through.

Writing it all up was fun because the computer here crashed one hour in to doing all the math and I had to restart the process of writing it all up. It's a bit more complicated than it seems because you have to add up a transfers worth of bus ticket costs. Oh well.

This week was really good. I was and am very happy. Our companionship is happy and going strong. Just that Carvalho and I are a bit without steam. Both just feeling really tired and a bit discouraged with some of the members and some of our investigators. So we went to Zone Conference wanting something big to motivate us. It was exactly what we needed, I think. President didn't talk about anything technical. Not one thing about new techniques or plans or goals or ideas. He just talked plan doctrine, and about how important our callings as missionaries are, and how we'll have help if we look for it. It was pretty much a big pep talk. Sister Pavan also really gave us a big boost with an awesome spiritual message. They are really very awesome people, President and Sister. I feel very close to them. In our interview President and I talked about the difficulties of the area and in our companionship and just everything else. He really just kind of gave me a pat on the back and told me that I was doing well. I was kind of surprised at that because we've been getting horrible numbers and President is known as being the kind of guy that would say, "You don't have baptisms? Just go and be obedient and diligent and it will work! Go to it already!" But Presidente understood. I was feeling like maybe I had done something wrong or not done enough to merit good results, but President reassured me that what counted was that I was doing what I thought was right, that I was trying to be my best. Really cool. I love President Pavan.

So much stuff happened this week. I kind of feel bad for rushing through all of it, because if I embellished it, I could make the news last for like 4 pages. Unfortunately, I think Elder Carvalho is gonna get really mad at me if I keep going, I think that if I don't finish up now we're gonna have a fight or something. I'll catch all you guys up next week, okay? Super sorry about that.

I love you guys! I am happy! I hope you are all well! I am praying for you all, always. You are so close to my heart. The reason that I'm here.

Love love LOVE you guys!

Elder Carpenter