Mark your calanders!

Mark your calendars so you can be at Sky Harbor Airport to welcome Jordan home. He will arrive:

Tuesday June 15th
, 2010
at 5:30 pm

on British Airways to Phoenix.

Everyone is invited to welcome him off the plane!

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Hey family

well another week has come and gone full of zone conferences and travels but it has been a great one. i am glad to hear that the nativity set made it home alright. It looks like people are still getting used to the fact that i have p day on saturdays but that is alright. Well this last week we loaded up our microbus with supplies water filters and two matresses for us and headed off to slovakia sunday afternoon, we spent the night there with the zone leaders and we had zone conference in the morning. Elder Mittanck and i did a training on giving people good reasons to meet with us. our example for it was we had this massive loaf of bread and we asked for a volunteer, he came up and we were like we want you to eat this whole loaf of bread right now, we were like come on its really good we have done it before you will like it it will help you, haha he was kind of confused but he passed, than i pulled out a 100 euro bill and asked him if he would eat it if i gave him a 100 euros and he quickly changed his mind (we didnt give him the chance to try) we related this to missionary work and how often we ask people to do things that may seem confusing to them without giving them a good reason to and we challenged them to all come up with personal reasons on how the gospel has blessed them specifically on different topics that they can share with people, and then we also had a presentation on goals and how to accomplish our goals and how to set them.

After zone conference in zilina we took off to bratislava where we went on exchanges with a young companionship in a brand new area that had just opened up and they had nobody to teach we were very blessed there and found them a lot of new people to start teaching, it was interesting working with slovaks i was surprised but i was able to understand everythign they said and communicate with them clearly, it was actually harder for me to understand the slovak missionaries than the natives, they are a much more believing people in slovakia so i had to switch up my contacts and style of teaching a bit.

tuesday evening we drove to brno where we stayed with the zone leaders had zone conference on wednesday and then worked with a companionship wednesday afternoon and thursday. A funny experience with that, i went tracting with the missionary i was working with and we went to these dorms, we got let in on the first door and taught this cool guy and we were going to continue trackting but my companion had to go to the bathroom, we were in the dorms so i was like just use the community bathroom i will wait out here by the elevators. i waited and waited and thought wow this is taking longer than i thought. then i got a call from the elder in the bathroom, he said " im stuck i cant get out of the stall the door is jammed" so i went in there and the door was jammed shut and locked and we tried everything but couldnt open it up. and these werent like normal stalls they were like individual rooms with a little space at the top between them about 8 feet up, he was able to throw his backpack through it and than jumped up and squezzed himself threw right when a confused student came in to see what was going on, haha we went to a different floor after that but got let in again and taught another student. After a long exhausting day we headed back to prague where we got to work in our area for 2 hours and we found 2 new investigators, the Lord blessed us greatly for helping others.

Friday zone conference here went well after that we had to catch up on a lot of errands for President since he is going to Poland for a conference but it has been a great successful week. It is a great privilege to work with so many of the missionaries, the missionaries here come from so many backgrounds and are so strong and dedicated, we don't have a single bad missionary in the whole mission and it is great to learn from all of them since they all have different strengths and experiences.

Today we are going to play soccer with a bunch of afrikans we are in contact with and than we have some good meetings set up this evening with people that we are working with. My time as a missionary is starting to feel short so that means i need to work even harder so i have no regrets. i hope you all have a great week and i love you very much and am grateful for your support in all that i do

love
elder hatch

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Hello family

Well this week has probably been the most packed week of my life but has been very enjoyable and I had a lot of great experiences, I basically had no time to write in my journal so this will take that place as well. Last monday we were over at the other elders apartment making pancakes waiting for transfer fax when I got a call at about 9:30 from president asking me to be his assistant, I accepted and he told me i needed to arrive in Prague later that afternoon. Well I hurried home and packed all my bags (which was record time for me on packing usually it takes me forever) threw my bags in the car and we drove over to the baliarovi for me to say goodbye and then to the train where we hurried and parked ran with my bags and caught a train at 1:00 heading to prague. Elder Mittank (my companion now) and Elder Williams picked me up and drove me back to the building where we had a little chat and started preparing for the week.

Tuesday morning Elder Mittank and I with President and Sister Slovacek went to the airport to pick up the new missionaries it was a huge group 15 brand new missioanries, we brought them back to the building where we trained them in contacting, ate lunch with them, and took them out on the prague walk. It was a fun time showing these 15 missionaries the beauties of prague. 4 of them are slovak elders and wont ever see prague again so president wanted to make sure they got to see all of the beauties here because Elder Perry really emphasizes that. It definitely blew away the greenies since most of them had never been to Europe before, we had to be on our toes to make sure nobody got lost moving around a group that big. We took them to a place to contact for an hour after we showed them the city and it was great seeing all of these young missionaries nervous about the language step out of their comfort zone and contact people and they were able to see a lot of success. They were all super excited afterward about how great it is to be a missionary which was very refreshing to see the energy and faith of these young missionaries. We took them out for a czech dinner of svickova afterwards and had them home by six o clock to be in bed. we walked them everywhere to wear them out so they could go to sleep early and adjust to the time frame. After we talked all 15 of them into bed we went up to talk to president about the new missionaries and their personalities and characteristics to help him in the process of matching them up with their trainers. I got to meet a few of our investigators tonight real quick and then elder mittank and I had to come up with our training for the trainers who would be coming in the next day. Wednesday morning we got up bright and early to run over to the foreign police with the passports of all the new missionaries to register them in the country. We returned to the building where we had a 2 hour training with all of the trainers. The mission has gotten very young; of the 15 trainers only 2 of them had ever trained before but that went very well.

President called us into his office after that where he asked our opinions on who should be with who. I was surprised by how much he valued our input with the whole process and then we all knelt in prayer and I was asked to pray to see if what we had come up with was right and it was an incredible opportunity to feel the spirit. We matched the missionaries up with their trainers and got them all off to their new areas. At this time the dying missionaries started coming in for their final interview with president. That evening we had dinner with them and were able to take part in their final testimony meeting. 2 of my favorite companions elder roberts and elder nowland were in this group plus a lot of other missionaries who are worked around. It was a great honor to hear their powerful testimonies and see how much they had progressed on their missions and i was able to bear my testimony as well. We had so many missionaries going home we tried to rent a bus to take them all to the airport but it was too late so elder mittank and i woke up at 4 and took all the bags we could to the airport and left the office elders there to watch them while we came back to pick up the departing elders and take them to the airport in three different cars. Sister slovackova baked us cinnamon rolls as thanks for waking up so early which was a nice treat.

After we got them all off we came back and it was back to work, we had to plan leadership conference and then put our skills to use as body guards to go pick up 95,000 krowns in cash from the bank to pay insurance (for some reason people in this country only deal in cash) Yesterday we got up early and hopped in the van down to brno where we had leadership conference. One thing that I have improved on dramatically on my mission is in speaking in front of people, elder mittank and I were responsible for about 3 hours of training yesterday with minimal time to prepare but with a lot of help from the spirit it was a wonderful success.

Today we are having our p-day and something cool is that the plzen branch is coming up here for a baptism today and they are baptizing a guy I found when I was there so I'm happy I get to see that. Tomorrow I will get to see church and than we will be driving off to slovakia. It has been a great week, humbling at times but I was able to feel the support and help of the Spirit all week long. My companion elder mittank is from my mtc group so it is a blast serving with him. everybody have a great week I love you all and I hope to hear from more of you next week

love
elder hatch

Monday, February 15, 2010

Monday, February 15th, 2010

hey guys this is going to be a short one

i am going to prague to serve which i am way excited to talk about its going to be a blast i have to catch a train in 45 minutes though so i am rushing. in prague things are a little different they have p-days on saturdays there so i will be talking to you on saturday and hoping to hear from you then, i didnt read any of your emails but i will print them out and read them and ill feel you in on everything in a few days. we had district conference in brno yesterday it was great i was able to see all my recent converts there from trebic and brno and olomouc great feeling to have
i love you all have a great day and thanks for being the best family ever

love elder hatch

ps i had valentines dinner with a 75 year old woman yesterday, hopefully kamille wont be too jealous

Monday, February 8, 2010

Monday, February 8th, 2010

hello family

It was a great week out here in olomouc, we challenged quite a few people to baptism and right now we have 4 people who have baptismal dates and are working for that. It was great to see how the Lord was preparing people this week to make changes. The sister of the woman baptized last transfer is working towards being baptized in march, her little two year old peed all over the place at the church building which was a fun experience to clean up, i just feel bad for her having to put up with him all the time definitely the most hyper little kid i have ever seen.

We got to experience getting a flat tire and changing it in the freezing cold with snow, haha my companion was actually pretty excited about that because he had never changed a tire before and was excited to learn so i showed him how to do that, we had a big fat screw in our tire but got it all fixed and taken care of. still working on teaching him to drive stick hopefully we will get that down in the next week because its pretty much a 100 percent sure that i am going to be leaving next week at transfers. Transfers should be pretty interesting since 20 percent of the mission will be getting replaced in a week so we are going to be having a lot of young missionaries here.

as probably most of you know i wasn't one for talking on the phone much before my mission but that has sure changed on the mission. we have free calling between missionaries and we have 4 different cities in our zone so we are always working the phones seeing how missionaries are doing and keeping them fired up and than constantly calling members and investigators luckily we have a great phone deal. Its a pretty funny story how we got such a great phone deal, there is a member in prague who is an american and is a multi millionaire and he has tons of connections and is always helping out the mission. well about 2 years ago it was about time for us to get a new phone deal and he was like i will take care of this. And he got like the top representatives from the 4 biggest cell phone companies in the czech republic and had them come to his office and had them sit in his conference room and just had them sit there with his assistants bringing them water over and over again and than he showed up a hour and a half late after they have been drinking water and he starts going over what each of the representatives had to offer for deals.
people started having to go to the bathroom and asked to be excused and he was like no i don't have time lets get this worked out now and than you can go, if you leave the room your company loses the deal. So he had these 4 representatives fighting against each other and they all had to go to the bathroom and we ended up with an amazing phone deal. In the czech republic cell phones are the biggest rip off. most people pay 30 dollars a month for a contract plus 15 cents for every minute spoken and 15 cents a text message.

I have no idea where i am going for transfers i hope prague just because i still haven't served there and my next city will be my last city but i will be fine going where ever they ask me and doing whatever they ask me to do. We had a great testimony meeting yesterday, the members who stay active here have such strong testimonies, you have to have a very strong testimony here to stay active just because there is so much working against people in this country to keep them from living the gospel- i respect them all so much.

we decided to push martin (who was supposed to get baptized this weekend) baptism back a few weeks just to firm him up some more. it was hard because he wanted to be baptized before i left but it is the best thing for him and it is also cool because he has asked the branch president to baptize him and its always better when members baptize then missionaries. well i have been kind of rambling on but i hope you all have a great week and valentines day, are you going to be doing the laser quest thing?

Love
Elder Hatch

Monday, February 1, 2010

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Dear Family

Life is going well here in Olomouc, The other elders in the city had to move out of their apartment this last week and are not moving into their next apartment until this next week so right now we have 4 missionaries in our apartment which is a new experience but we are getting used to it. most of the furniture in the old apartment was owned by the church so now all of that furniture is stored in our apartment so we have quite a bit of stuff now but luckily our apartment is pretty big so there is room for everything, haha the biggest problem is we have just a little half sized fridge so we will be making a lot of food from scratch this next week.

The work is going well here the Lord is blessing us quite a bit here, i had a pretty interesting phone call this week we had been working with the sister of a recent convert a little bit and i had given her a book of mormon with a chapter to read and i called her up to ask how she liked the chapter and she was like its great and then she was like i have been thinking and i was wondering if we could meet and talk more about that baptism my sister did, i think i might want to do that too, haha didn't have to ask us that question more than once so we are meeting with her now and she was at church yesterday and really liked it, a big problem with her will be her son, she has a 2 year old son who is very hyper and goes crazy in church so she had to leave the room quite a bit to try and get him to quiet down.

Martin who is getting baptized in 2 weeks was at church again and he brought his family with him and they really enjoyed it so hopefully they will be following his example. One of my favorite things as a missionary is reviewing word of wisdom with people as they are preparing for baptism because the phrase word of wisdom is kind of interesting in czech and people never remember it so usually we just call it the law of health. we just had a meeting with martin about an hour ago and we were like today we are going to review the word of wisdom and he was like whats that? the scriptures? but once we got started he realized what it was and he is all for it.

We are the branch presidents home teachers and they have these 3 little kids so we were thinking about an activity we could do to go along with the first presidency message for January which was basically about keeping your testimony in hard circumstances. I remember an object lesson my trainer elder anderson had talked about and decided to try it, basically you take corn starch and water and mix it together and its this liquid stuff, if you grab a handful of it into your hands and play with it and rool it around it is solid and looks completely solid but as soon as you stop it turns to liquid and so we shared that with them and the kids loved it. We talked about how our testimonies are strong when we are constantly working with them and reading and praying but whenever we stop or "take a break" it turns to liquid and goes away. It kind of made a mess but we were able to clean it up and the family really liked it. I really like the branch presidents family here they are very loving and do so much to support the branch and help the missionaries out.

So I will be probably leaving olomouc in two weeks or so and my companion doesn't know how to drive stick so I need to teach him that which should be a fun experience. I better study up on the christ like virtue of patience before I start that one. so I am pretty excited for spring i know its a little ways off still but i am excited to get out of the cold and snow and into sunny spring time.

A lot of recent converts and less actives who we visit have been pretty sick recently so it has been a great opportunity to give blessings. In this one family the two youngest a 4 year old and a 1 1/2 year got meningitis and the mom said that after the priesthood blessing they immediately started getting better, another testimony builder to the power of prayer and priesthood. The longer I serve a mission the more and more grateful I am for the knowledge that we do have a Heavenly Father who knows and loves us and he sent his son Jesus Christ to atone for us and that they still love us in this day and continue to give us guidance. Everybody have a great week and I love you all.

love,
Elder Hatch
ps wish elder gould a happy birthday for me