November 17th, 2008

Hello family,

It has been another exciting and busy week here in liberec, we will start off with some good news. We have been working with this guy named lukas he is 23 and from slovakia and last thursday we gave him a baptismal date which was awesome. The date is for the 29th of november which is really quick but he is a very nice guy and wanting to work to it and change his life around. We taught him the law of chastity on saturday night which is always one of the if not toughest commitment to have them except. He knew it was a good thing to do and after some talking he accepted it which was sweet. we went and picked him up and walked him to church yesterday morning. it turns out he lives like 150 yards away from us which is very convenient.

We are working with another man named lukas who showed up to church out of nowhere i guess he used to be an investigator along time ago but couldnt quit smoking and he asked us if we could help him stop smoking and teach him the gospel and of course we were more than willing to agree. We have a program called the stop smoking program it has 15 steps i think missionaries everywhere have it and we started it with him and he is doing awesome. we started it 3 days ago and he hasnt smoked. we call him every 3-4 hours to check in and give him support he is so excited and happy about it which is awesome. He smoked quite a bit after an hour of not smoking his hands were shaking like crazy but he followed all the steps and is good.

Then we have this man named zemon who we found, he is like a 35 year old blue collar worker very rugged and reserved. So we taught him and gave him a book of mormon he showed up to our next meeting 3 days later and was at alma 7 he said he came home from a hard day of work at the factory sat down and started reading and he just got some much peace and it cleared his thoughts that he kept on reading. He came to church yesterday and i sat next with him, he is very quiet but really loved singing and he told me church was perfect. one of the talks was on the word of wisdom and when the speaker ended he gave a big amen which was cool to hear.

We went tracting this week and got let in by these two men from uzbekistan who were very nice they told us their story they were working with this company and it was rivaling a state owned company so uzbekistan took it over and through all the leaders in prison but these two men were able to escape and now they are working here sending money home to support the families of the men in prison. They are muslim and pretty much tried to convert us but we gave them a book of mormon and they gave us a koran so we called it even.

Now for some bad news, Jvan has to leave the country in 20 days. When he was in moldova he signed up for this program to come work here and pretty much it is ran by these shady guys who get people to come work here and they provide a flat and have hook ups for jobs but then take like half of their paycheck so they barely have enough money and then charge them 7000 krowns for visa work which costs less then a 1000. Well these guys decided to really rip off jvan and took the 7000 krowns but didnt do the visa work so his visa expired and the police stopped him and detained him last night.

we just talked with him this morning, he is banned from the czech repulic for a year so he has to go home to modolva and he said he might go work in ukraine. We talked with him a little bit about the perpetual education fund and are gonna have a meeting with him and our branch president before he leaves so we can make sure he gets in contact with the church for help wherever he goes, he was pretty upset about what happened hopefully everything works out well with him.

Things are going well here with the work i am loving it, we had some snow flurries this morning, its not that cold when its calm but usually its pretty windy and the wind is what gets you but we are staying warm. It sounds like everything is going well at home which is a good to hear. Transfers are coming up in 2 1/2 weeks so dont send any mail here until i found out if im leaving because there is a pretty good chance i might leave. I hope everybody has a good week with work and school, remember to choose the right.

Love
Jordan