Feb 22, 2016

So today is the day we find out about transfers. Hopefully I'll be
staying here and hopefully I won't be getting a new companion. I like
the way things are now. I should find out around lunch time here so
I'll send another email with the update.

This week had a lot of us and downs,

Rashid is our Muslim investigator who believes the church is true but
he has a smoking problem. Rule is that they have to wait a week not
smoking before their baptized. President chambers called us and old us
to wait 2 weeks with Rashid. We told Rashid and he wasn't happy about
having to wait longer but that day he also crushed up his pack of
cigarets and threw them away. He called it "braking up with his 10
year girlfriend." He went 4 days until on of his friends got him to
smoke again. We told him that his friend is stupid and that he
shouldn't be around people that bring him down like that. But he's one
of Rashid's only friends here that speaks his native Tongue. He felt
really frustrated that he could only go 4 days without smoking but we
explained that repentance is a process and that he should be happy
with 4 days. Now we're going to try to go 5 without smoking and if he
can do it then we're going to celebrate with him.

Right now we're spending most of our time visiting members of the
relief society that haven't been to church in a while to possibly find
less actives or non members to teach and also to help out our relief
society president sister Luque who does so much for us. Well cleaned
up most of the list and we did find many people who are ready to be
taught. The only problem is that they live in the sisters area (our
Ward is split between us and some sister missionaries) so we had to
give them all to the sisters. But I hear that the sisters are having a
lot of success with the people we found so it still was a very good
project. Also sister Luque is very happy that we did this for her and
we're happy to help.

We taught a couple yesterday night named Daniel and Genesis. They are
completely ready to learn and I know that they would join the church
soon. However they live outside of the mission. We found them at the
house of our young men's president. They told us they live in the wood
gate apartments. The apartments are split into 3 sections. 2 of those
sections are in our mission. The other is in the West mission. I could
hit their house with a rock thrown from my area! So we're going to try
to get special permission to teach them. They already told us that
they want to continue going to the Spanish Ward with the young men's
president and wouldn't go anywhere else. So we're pretty confident
that we will be able to teach them.

Other than that we've found a lot of Hispanics on the streets and just
testified of the gospel right them and their. It's still really hard
to make sense in Spanish but we're told in Preach My Gospel to open
our mouths and just start making words even if you don't know what
your going to say before hand. If we do this we're promised the help
of the Lord and that our mouths will be filled. I've never had a bad
experience yet talking to people on the street in Spanish and that's
because the Lord keeps his promises. D&C 33:8-10

Hope everyone is doing well,

Elder Austin