Elder Kallin Austin

Hi, hows it going?

I'm doing great!  I was sick as a dog my first week in the field but I'm feeling much better now.  My new companion has been here for 21 months.  He's from Florida but he tells everyone that he's from Costa Rica because that's where he was born. He is fluent in Spanish and English so he has been helping me a lot. We live in the basement of a member's house but apparently we're moving today because the sisters need it. For some reason the wife left the husband of the people they where staying with so now they need to leave. 

We do have a car which is nice and our area is HUGE!!! We have many investigators and the Hispanic community here is enormous!!!! We go tracting a lot in trailer parks and random neighborhoods. We're not allowed to teach English speakers so whenever we run into anyone who speaks English only, we just ask him if he knows any of his neighbors that speak Spanish. My Spanish is terrible! I can't understand anyone! I only get about 30% of what's said and I can understand more than I can speak. But everyone tells me that my Spanish is good for someone who's only been out for 7 weeks. Our main problem with investigators is that no one is married. They all like to live together but none of them are married. And so they can't get baptized unless they do get married. But either the man or the women doesn't want to get married but the other one does. It's really weird. I don't understand. 

All the members here are really good to us. We've had a dinner appointment every day and they feed us way too much!!! Yesterday we had an amazing lesson with a couple. This couple is named José and Margarita. They are related to a family at church and so they were present during sacrament meeting. They're going to be here for 2 more months and they want to learn more about the church. And so later that night we went to the home of the member family's home to teach this couple. We taught the restoration and the entire time you could tell that they were interested. They didn't ask many questions but they were considering everything we told them. You could tell that they were feeling the spirit the entire time. After the lesson we asked them if they would be baptized. We now have two baptisms scheduled for the 17th of next month. 

I hope everyone is doing well and I'll email next week

Elder Austin