Family,

One Year!!! On the way down now. I decided that I will just count me going into the MTC on the 26th of January because I came here on the 26th of April. And so I hit my year mark this last week and we are celebrating it today by going to Panda Express. Elder Mangum, our District Leader, hit his year mark on the 27th as well. So we will be going home together and we are celebrating it today. The house is looking good, even though he hasn't updated it. Sounds like a lot of work. To bad I'm not there to put to work. Yes even one year out on the mission and I'm still thinking of going into construction. It's going to be tough to talk me out of that one... ha ha!

Well this week was just okay. We are having a lot of scheduled appointments but I think almost every single one has fallen through. So we have been teaching people by knocking and finding them or by visiting potential investigators. It's real tough to go into a day with 8 lessons planned and have every single one of them fall through. It is the Hispanic culture I think... but at the same time I love the Hispanic culture. One reason I do is because of experiences that we have each week. The one that made me love the culture this week was that we were just working in a ghetto apartment complex just walking around and trying to contact some potentials and there were two families in the parking lot with their music blazing having lunch, make legit tacos with sausage. So we went and started talking to them and instantly they asked, "You want a taco?" I jumped on that invitation real fast and was like "Yeah, of course I do." So we ate some homemade tacos in the parking lot while talking to these families about our lives and what we do.

We have a return appointment with one of the families tonight actually. We are excited for them because we were just being normal people while we were talking to them but at the same time sharing the gospel. We notice sometimes as missionaries we get into a whole presentation and just lecture them but this was one of the many times where we are just being ourselves and loving the people.

Nobody came to church yesterday. Gustavo had to work, and the Quintanilla family (the one that we took Linda to) is just very flaky. They cancelled on us as we were knocking on their door this last week. And she always says that she is busy when it comes to church or when we try to set up an appointment the next day. We are going to go over there one more time and if they aren't willing to come to church then we are going to have to drop them. They are a sweet family, just not willing to take steps to find out if this is true or not.

We don't have anyone progressing as of now. Everyone is just blowing the game, and not keeping commitments and coming to church when we talk to them at 11 in the morning on Sunday and they say that they are coming. But that is the hard part about the mission is allowing people to have agency right?

So we have so many crazy experiences in this area. We had some crazy ones this last week as well. One of them was last night. We were walking in an apartment complex and there were two 7 or 9 year olds playing and my companion said "Hola". They said it back to him and then just laughed. And as we were walking away they say "Hola" and we said "Hola" back, and they laughed and said "Ellos dijieron Hola" Which means, "They said Hola." We came to the conclusion that we were being made fun of by 9 year olds because we have bad Spanish. Ha - we kind of just laughed and brushed it off and moved on. So you can tell that Spanish is coming okay, I guess... I am learning a lot of new words and it is just trying to use them and apply them that is the hard part.

That is about it for this week. I love you all! Have a good week!

Elder Harvey