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