October 20th, 2008

Hello everybody

Everything is going well here and we are pretty busy all the time which is good. We spent alot of time with Jvan this last week just getting everything ready for him and the baptism he is way excited about it. He even brought a friend from work with him to one of the meetings and we answered some of his questions and hopefully will start meeting with him soon so he is already giving us referrals. We have decided for his baptism it will be held in Prague since its a little too cold to baptize in an outside pond right now but Jvan is such a stud he was like it doesnt matter where i get baptized i could take the cold if i needed too but it will probably be more enjoyable in Prague and the members are getting together to figure out how to get everyone to prague they are very excited about it since they havent had one in 2 years. This week it finally became real to them that he is actually getting baptized they have had quite a few fall through in the past but they did an awesome job of fellowshipping him and people saying they want to teach with him and inviting him over for dinner so that was awesome we are reallly happy about how accepting and welcoming the branch is to him. He has also been to church 6 out of the 7 weeks we have known him so this next week we are gonna be putting alot of focus on making sure it goes through.

President Slovacek and his wife came to our branch for church on sunday which everybody was excited about he and his wife are trying to tour around and go to a different branch every week to see the members and the missionaries. Somebody asked but there are two districts not one there is the prague district which i am in and the brno district which includes all of slovakia.

We had zone conference on thursday which meant another trip down to prague it almost feels like im going there once a week. It was a really good one we learned lots of new stuff which is good we worked alot on trackting approaches since contacting is alot harder in winter. A big focus is on using the family home evening program, talking about how it strengthens families and holding one for the people so me and elder nowland are practicing our family home evening's and we are even gonna make a dont eat pete board and use that we think the little kids will love that since we both loved it when we were little. It was fun to see everybody at zone conference and talk with Elder Andersen i have been blessed with two very good companions to start out my mission here in the czech republic. Elder Andersen has a baptisim this saturday as well so we are gonna combine them which will be fun.

The food we had at the returned sister missionaries was really good it was meat cooked serbian styled i think and it was really good, we were running late from a meeting so we showed up late but she was very kind since she knows all about that we ate and then had to take off running back into the city since no bus was coming for a while and we had a meeting with Jvan but it all worked out well we had a good meal got in some good exercise and had a great meeting so what more can you ask for. Saturday we had a game night at the church from 4-6 and had food games and ping pong it was good for our investigators and members to mix and have fun together and the weekends are so dead here that it is a good use of time. I was able to put my czech skills to good use yesterday and translate for sister slovacek a little bit as she was talking to Jvan which was fun luckily she spoke very simply, i can actually talk to him and understand him better then czechs because since he is from moldova he speaks pretty crappy czech and i speak crappy czech so it mixes well its funny because sometimes i can understand him better then my companion and my comp can understand czech's very well so its a good match up. I think that is all for this weeks letter i hope everybody has a good week thanks for all of the love and support you give me.

Love
Elder Hatch