Monday June 15th, 2009

Hello family from Plzen

This past week has been full of many adventures and experiences from saying goodbye in Trebic to getting to know Plzen. So I guess I can start off from Trebic, Tuesday we had like 6 meetings with investigators to say goodbye so we made the best out of the situation and had some good meetings to help our investigators progress. Marcella our librarian friend it turns out has been talking to her son and daughter quite a bit about us. We went over to her apartment for the first time and she had probably a good thousand books but the one lying on her night stand was the Book of Mormon which is always a good sign. She told us that she just feels the spirit radiating off of us which is always good.

Tomas Kouptik we were teaching him and we weren't planning on giving him a baptisimal date but i was feeling the spirit so i popped it out on him and he accepted, he will be getting baptized in 4 weeks and Vojtak is doing awesome he will be getting baptized this Saturday.

My 5 1/2 hour train ride went well, as luck would have it I got on the same train as another missionary from Brno so we were together for about 3 hours talking about how the work is going and what ideas we had for our new areas and districts. Elder Graham was waiting for me at the train station with the rest of the district we dropped my stuff off and headed off to teach a lesson to a investigator and get all settled in.

My first district meeting went well I focused it on helping our investigators have spiritual experiences and had it 2 parts the first part on them having spiritual experiences in our meetings with three points of emphasis to help us accomplish that.

1. Love in the companionship so we can have the spirit with us and so that our investigators can tell that we are completely unified.

2. Testifying and about how that brings the spirit

3. Working from PMG to help improve our teaching skills. The second part was on teaching our investigators how to have spiritual experiences on their own away from our meetings. It went really well and I was pretty happy with how it went. We have a good district here, there is my companion Elder Graham from Oregon, Elder Mcfarland from Utah he grew up on a dairy farm and is a real nice guy and Elder Lance a wrestler from California it makes for a good mix.

Thursday after district meeting we were in this park contacting and there was nobody there and we were like dang there is no body here this is a waste of time we should leave, but then we were like well we put down that we would be here so we will give it a shot. As we continue walking we see this young man walking towards us and we start talking with him and then sit down on a bench and he starts sharing with me about how he wants to become clean and feel good so we taught him about Christ and repentance and then gave him a chapter to read in the Book of Mormon about repentance we set up another meeting for Saturday.

Well Saturday comes along and we are there and here comes Vratislav (thats his name) we sit down and he tells us about how he has been wanting to control his thoughts and lately he has had a lot of bad thoughts even though he wants to have good thoughts. He goes on to explain that while reading in the Book of Mormon he had no problem controlling his thoughts, he read the chapter and quite a bit more. As we started talking with him more it came up that he has never been baptized and as we talked about that he expressed a desire that it would be something he would like. So we set up a date and talked with him about how it would go and now he is working to get baptized on July 18th. I felt like i was in South America with him, find somebody and than two days later commit to baptism.

Saturday we had a service project for the branch. There is a big backyard behind the church and they had all this brush they need to get rid of so we were helping them burn it for about 3 hours, haha it seemed way too fun to be service just throwing wood in a fire it was a good way to start getting to know some members in the branch. Church went well there is a very nice medium size branch here in Plzen. There are a lot of older people who were baptized during communism and are way strong plus two families with young kids. There were 36 people at church on Sunday. I was asked to give a talk about how members can help us missionaries progress the work, which is always a great opportunity and I think the members took my talk pretty well.

Today we decided to start off the transfer with a district trip to get unity going strong so we headed off to Karlovy Vary. Its this town famous for its spas and natural springs and famous for guys for the fact that the hotel from casino royal (James Bond) with the poker game is in this town. Its probably the most beautiful town I have been in and we met up there with Elder Andersen and his family since he is with them here touring around. You buy these little cups and you walk through the town drinking water from the fountains its pretty fun except for the fact the water doesnt taste good. I guess what you are supposed to do is go see a doctor and he tells you what is wrong and he assigns a certain fountain from you to drink from. They say if you drink from too many different fountains you might get diarrhea but i couldn't resist trying all of them and so far i am fine but i guess we shall see :)

Well that is about all from me this week, I am working hard over here in the Czech Republic and loving every minute of it. Here is my new address for here in Plzen

Jordan Hatch
Elisky Krasnohorske 20
301 00 Plzen
Czech Republic

Have a great week I love you all

Love,
Elder Hatch

Monday June 8, 2009

Hey family

Well today was when all the transfer information came out and I got a call from President this morning. It turns out that my stay in trebic is going to be a short one, I am leaving Wednesday for Plzen, I am going to be serving as District Leader there. Plzen is on the far west side of the country and is the 4th biggest city in the Czech Republic I believe. Its about an hour by car west of Prague i think. I haven't served around anybody in the district before but i have heard good things. My companion is Elder Graham and I have heard he is an amazingly nice and sincere missionary. I am sad to be leaving Trebic and to miss out on seeing these people we found get baptized but I know that Plzen is where the Lord wants me to be so I am glad to go. I have gotten close to the members here too they are pretty amazing. Sunday the branch president had us over and than we had dinner at another members house. Today we got up and went to a city called Telc, it is in between Jihlava and Trebic so we went and met there to read the transfer fax. It is a pretty cool city with a big namesti and all these colored houses it is right in between two lakes so it is completely surrounded by water.

The best news from this last week is that Vojtech has accepted an invitation to be baptized. He will be getting baptized in less then 2 weeks on june 20th. He is 17 and has already asked his parents for permission and they have given it. We taught him about the word of wisdom last week and he loved it, he thought it was the best thing ever that the Lord would bless us with this knowledge long before it was found scientifically to be bad for us, he already lives it all his parents taught him it is bad to smoke and drink which is a pretty unique thing here in the czech republic. He has two younger brothers 14 and 11 so who knows what might happen in the future with them.

Ana went to Prague to visit a friend and when she was there she saw a baptism which was a good experience for her. The members are pretty excited for Vojtech's baptism and are very supportive of helping us teach him. One of the sisters in the branch teaches English at a high school here and we found and taught one of her students this week which she was excited to see. We also found and taught twice this week a 17 year old young man who we found out at the end of the second meeting. He is the 18-and-under Czech champion for the 100 meter dash. He was very humble about it. We have another meeting with him this week since he was gone over the weekend for a track meet.

A funny story from contacting this last weekend is we were talking to this older woman probably about 65 and she was telling us about some problems she has had in her life with health issues and we were talking about how the gospel can help us in all situations when we are happy and life is great and also how it can help sustain us through our problems. She was like, you are such nice young men and than she opened up her back pack and pulled out some oven mitts and handed them to us and than just walked off, so we have a brand new set of oven mitts in our apartment.

The weather has been pretty rainy and cold the past two weeks here, a couple of times I have even be wearing a suit with a sweater so it doesn't feel like June, sometimes the sun will come out for a couple of hours and get pretty warm.

That is pretty much everything from this week, a week from now I will be writing to you from Plzen, I looked it up and its a 5 1/2 hour train ride from here so that should be some good time for reflection.

I love you all and hope you have a great week

Love,
Elder Hatch

Monday June 1st, 2009

Hello family

This is another email from brno we are here to do a zone activity on p-day.

This was a good week here in Trebic, we spent 2 days in Jihlava this week helping out the Elders there boost up their area and find some people for them to teach, it went really well and we were able to find alot of good people for them to start working with. We had three people bare their testimonys to us this week about Joseph smith and how they found out he was a prophet and the Book of Mormon is true they are Ana, Tomas this 19 year old young man and Vojetek this 17 year old stud. It is looking like all three will be getting baptized this month.

Tomas has been thinking about baptism and we read this talk with him from conference called you know enough and it really touched him, we asked him what he thought is the next step for him and he established some spiritual goals with us to 1 read the book of mormon 2 pray daily and 3 be baptised. Yesterday after church we came home and knocked on our neigbors door to see how they are doing, they are this older couple he had a stroke about 10 years ago and we have always been super nice to them, well they invited us in to hear about what we are doing here as missionarys and we shared a spiritual thought with them which they really enjoyed and they are excited for us to come back and share more with them.

There is a family here who bought an old house and are rebuilding it so we go over and do service once in a while, this last week we broke up the concrete floor of their living room with a sledge hammer and it was like a half sized sledge hammer so we were pretty sore after that, plus we had to shovel like 30 wheelbarrels worth of dirt so my little forearms were a little sore after that. but i always enjoy getting to do some physical service to mix things up.

We are working with alot of less activis here and we are seeing alot of success from it as their testimonies start to be rekindled, one of them reminds me of an 80’s rocker but he is starting to make some changes.

Here is a funny story, so we see this old guy with a big old beard in leather pants, leather jacket that says white zombie on the back a leather cowboy hat and a big rotwieler, we have seen him a couple of times so we decided to talk to him and we ask him what the most important thing in his life is and he said God we were both taken aback and he goes on to bare his testimony about God and than is like i am sorry i am in a hurry but i would love to talk to you some time, we saw him yesterday while we were hurrying to church and he remembered our names and yelled hi to us from across the street, I guess its true that you cant judge a book by its cover.

I read a article everyday from general conference and i read a great one yesterday about faith, it talks about how we can give our kids piano lessons, sports, toys, fun memories, but all these things add up to nothing if we dont give them Faith in Christ and I want to thank you mom and dad for raising me well and giving me all of those things but most of all for giving me that Faith in Christ.

This is our last week of our transfer here in Trebic so we are working hard to finish out with a bang.

I love you all and hope you have a great week

Love

Elder Hatch