Monday September 1st, 2008

Hey family it sounds like you guys have had another good week. All is well here we had a great week last week, we have a standards of excellence here for our mission on certain key indicators and we hit it for the first time on finding new investigators which was awesome, we found 3 new investigators this last week, the first is this cool kid named quan he is from vietnam and has been here for two years going to school it was cool because i was the one that contacted him he was walking along with his head looking straight down and i stopped him and started talking to him.

What me and my companion do is switch off every other on contacting and when i contact i tell them something brief about our message and ask them a question sometimes i can respond to their answer but usually they blast something out real quick and my companion is really good about stepping in and responding for me. The language is coming along slowly every day sometimes it feels like i havent progressed at all since i have got here but i know i have it is just a process i am getting better at listening. usually i can have a general idea what people are talking about and then i ask my companion for specifics.

Another one of our investigators is a women we found in the Jablonec area book, Jablonec is a city close to ours that used to have missionaries but got closed down and we have the area now. We called the woman up and said she would love to hear from us so yesterday after church we hopped on a tram for the 30 minute ride there and found her place luckily it is kind of hard to find addresses here. She is a very nice woman she was telling us how she had been in the hospital for 3 months and started pulling her shirt down to show us her surgery i got scared and thought she was going to flash us but luckily we were spared and she just showed us a big bump that was her pacemaker.

I am quite the tea drinker now haha although it is approved tea we can have fruit tea and herbal tea. The fruit tea is pretty good if you put in sugar but the herbal tea can be pretty hard to choke down some times it tastes like you are drinking hot grass.

We dont have a phone in our apartment each companionship has a cell phone which makes things soo easy it would be very hard to not have one here since we are out of the apartment so much and it helps us stay in contact with our investigators, i think most people here dont have house phones and just cell phones some of our investigators ask us to just text them since they have limited minutes.

In answer to your question grandma alot of people i have met work in factories or machine shops. I have recieved some rude responses which kind of shock you at first but you just brush them off keep on going and laugh about them later. And we see the other elders in our district pretty much everyday, for awhile our washing machine was broken so they would wash our clothes for us but ours is fixed now.

Today me and my companion went on a vylet to Kost Castle it was a sweet castle its a "real" castle from the middle ages not one of the chateuxs. School started back up today so we were basically the only ones there a member looked up on the interenet and gave us the train and bus times we were on our second bus there and were talking to the driver and told him where we were going usually its a 3 kilometer walk from the bus station but he took us in so we only had to walk 1 kilometer very nice guy, the transportation system is pretty amazing here.

For cooking my companion knows a bunch of meals and we cook together and he teaches me how to make them all so i can make them when we arent together anymore. We took honza one of our main investigators out to our branch presidents house for dinner it went great it was a really good experience for him. Our branch president speaks perfect english and he was telling us how for dessert we have two choices we can have a water based ice cream or regular ice cream. My companion and i just looked at each other trying to figure out what water based ice cream is then he brought it out and we were like ohhh we call that a popsicle it was pretty funny he and his wife are very nice and willing to do whatever it takes to help out with missionary work his wife reminds me alot of Jenni.

I cant believe i have already been here for a month it is going by quick. The gospel of Jesus Christ is amazing it truly does bless lives. I love you all and hope you have a great week

Love
Elder Hatch