To All My Dear Fans

Dear Family,

Mom, I finally got the package of beans this past week. I haven´t opened it yet, but I´m planning on making (why don´t they sell them here? Why?) Tortillas this week and enjoying a meal of burritos this week. I can´t wait for that packaged sour cream stuff.

This past week was pretty chill for the most part, but yesterday was a whirlwind of movement. And stress. And stuff. I won´t go into all the teeny tiny details, but I´ll let you in on a few things. For example, we were in the office all day. Meaning we didn´t teach any lessons. Ugh. Because transfers came in so late last week we had to use our mission´s petty cash reserve to buy the plane tickets. (yes we are an island mission so every transfer includes buying plane tickets). So because we didn´t have any petty cash I ended up using the rest of my monthly missionary payment yesterday to pay for mission supplies. So I had to use my personal money to buy groceries today. Also one of our missionaries´ houses had water and power cut yesterday because we hadn´t been paying the bills. My first thought was, ´´there´s no way. We pay the bills every month on time.´´ We eventually figured out that we had been paying the bill for the missionarys´ landlord´s house and not our missionaries´ house. But he had also been paying. So the water/power company had been getting double paid. So we had to get all that mess figured out and get power and water restored to our missionaries. We also had to do all the missionaries´ monthly payments for June so that they will have money next week for food and stuff.

Ok, so that was all yesterday. We didn´t have a baptism last week nor will we have one this week, unfortunately. And it seems that most of the people we had thought were ready to get baptised in the next little bit aren´t. Or rather they don´t feel ready, which in context means they don´t want to make the changes they need to receive the promised blessings of the Lord. They´ve had the lessons, they´ve been to the activities, they´ve been to church; they just don´t want to change. Or they don´t recognize the importance of baptism. Either way, we´re still working and we´re going to be finding more people to work with. Hopefully we can find some of the ´elect´ who will accept the truth and make and keep the necessary commitments to receive their own personal salvation. We can´t force them, and we don´t want to. But if they don´t want it, we´ll find others who do. I think too many people just like to talk to us, which is good. But we´re not here just to be peoples friends.

Anyways, time seems to move faster every transfer. Hopefully it will slow down a little after I get out of the office. Right now it just seems that with all we´re doing, we don´t have time to do everything.

Well, I´m healthy. One of the missionaries here got a really bad bite but he´s doing well. They´re not sure what it was but it got really swollen and was all full of pus and got really bad after only a few days so he had to get surgery and antibiotics and all sorts of stuff. He´s recuperating in the mission home for now which whould be so boring. I would much rather be out working and doing stuff. Which is what I´m doing.

Loves to all. Keep writing.

~Elder Peterson