August 6, 2012

Hello all,

Not too much has been going on this week. Sandy and her kids came to church yesterday and are really excited about being baptized on the 26th. Blake who is a part of a part member family is also excited to be baptized on the 25th. We have been teaching them a lot this week to prepare them for baptism in a couple of weeks. It is really cool. But yesterday we had a surprise text. We talked to a member in our ward at church on Sunday and she said that she that her nephew wanted to start taking the missionary lessons. So we set up a time to meet with them on Wednesday. Later in the day on Sunday we got a text message saying that this boy wanted to get baptized as soon as possible and they set up the date on Aug 19th at 6pm. So it was really cool getting an unexpected text like that. Our zone is going to break the Ipswich Zone record this month. The record is only 10 baptisms in a month. and in our zone we have 17 baptismal dates set for the rest of August as a district. 8 of those are just from me and my companion. We also met with some other investigators that aren't progressing very fast. One of the biggest problems for people in Australia is that they live with their partners, but are not married. So one of our investigators named Navi really wanted to get baptized next month, but his partner doesn't want to get married for another year. Our investigator Rachel is still having problems with her family letting her be baptized. We found a couple of potential investigators this week. We have some lessons set up with them this week, so hopefully we will have some new investigators at the end of the week. That is about as far as the work is going. We are really busy and August is a really busy month for everyone one in the mission. I am privileged to start as a missionary in the zone I am in because people actually listen to us when we try to talk to them. There aren't very many rude people. I haven't learned much Samoan this week because we have been really busy with missionary work, but I have picked up on a few things. Who knows if I will ever be able to become fluent in it. But that doesn't matter as much as the work does at this time. The missionary work is keeping us busy. Even though all the Samoan people feed us a lot of food I have lost 6 kg's so far on my mission. I don't know how many pounds that is, but it is over 10 lbs. We are keeping really busy and I really like doing all the missionary work. One of my goals is to try and enjoy tracting as much as possible. the 7 of our baptisms were people we found by tracting. So even though everyone doesn't listen us there is that occasional person who will listen to us. Overall the missionary work is good and I am learning a lot. This is the last week of my first transfer (6 weeks) and so I only have 6 more weeks with my trainer. The mission president said I will probably be serving in Raceview until January. It has been getting down to 0 degrees Celsius in the mornings and so it has been pretty cold. The people who live here think the world is going to end at that point. But I have survived a lot colder. That is about it for this week. I will let you all know of my busy week next week. I miss you all.
 
Love,
Elder Kyler Powelson