September 22nd, 2008

Hello everybody

It was a good week here in liberec we had some pretty good success with finding new people. One of our investigators i think i have talked about him before is from Serbia his name is Radosvav and he is here doing construction work. We had a great meeting with him on thursday its difficult to teach because both his english and czech arent very good but we get by it just takes awhile sometimes. He is the nicest guy he works like 10 hours everyday construction but the guy is always so happy i love meeting with him and talking with him and then he came to church on sunday which was sweet. He asked me where in america i was from and i said arizona and he hadnt heard of it so he asked me what the capitol of it was and i said phoenix he got all excited and said "like the phoenix suns?" it was funny hearing him talk about them in his broken english steve nash is his favorite player and then he started talking about charles barkley haha i had the biggest smile on my face and then he got all quite leaned into me and asked "you know who is vlade divac?" and of course i said yes good ole divac i guess he is from serbia and is their national hero basically so he was very happy that i knew who he was.

On thursday we had zone conference which was a good time going to the mission home in prague for it, I found out im staying here for next transfer so i will be in liberec for another two months which i am excited about. elder Andersen is heading out since he has been here for 6 months so im working hard at building relationships with the members to carry over for when he is gone. We went running this morning as a district which is something we are going to do everyday this week and i have a feeling my legs are going to be dead, haha it was pretty tough since i havent ran in 2 months but its good for me. Its a good thing i wasnt in the triatholon or i would have been far far behind but its good to hear that you all did great.

The language is coming along its alot like how uncle steve kittleson told me it was for him, i can understand pretty much everything my companion says to people, i can understand like 50% what they say back to him but then when they talk to me my brain freezes up and i catch like 25% of it, my speaking is improving the hardest part is you dont know what to say because you couldnt understand what they said to you, and it takes awhile for me to think of the right vocab and then hurry and try to declinate it so usually i just spit something that is mixed up but they can understand even though it is not correct czech.

In the Czech republic they celebrate birthdays and name days, since there are only so many approved names each name is associated with a day, yesterday was matouse which is matthew so everybody in the czech republic named matthew had like a second birthday. The one primary kid in our branch is named matouse so elder andersen and i bought him a little lego wrapped it up and gave it to him at church yesterday. made the little kids day, he was showin it to everybody so i have a new 6 year old best friend. I got the package from you mom thank you very much, tell the Utah Hatch's thanks for their emails it was good to hear how everything is going for them. I hope everybody has a great week.

Love
Elder Hatch