Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Dear family,

Well the most hectic week of the year came and went successfully here. We had 9 new missionaries scheduled to come in this week but we weren't sure if they would be able to make it and we had 13 missionaries going home and we were scared their flights would get cancled and they would have to stay another week here before they could get home but luckily everything worked out well and we got the new ones and sent the old ones off safely. My new companion is Elder Doxey he is from california and is a great missionary he came in on tuesday, on thursday we sent elder mittanck off to ceske budejovice to train a new missionary, I am going to miss him he is a great missionary but he will do great things there. The best part of the week was hearing the departing missionaries testimonies, this group of missionaries that went home was an amazing group and it makes me nervous because they are the last group before my group.

Yesterday we went down to brno for leadership conference which turned out well and we have some good focuses going in the mission. Looking out over the leaders it surprised me by how young everybody is all of a sudden but the mission is in good hands we have a lot of good young missionaries. Right now I am probably more focused than I have ever been on my mission i want to finish strong and the lord has been blessing us. We got two more baptismal dates this week max and samuel so that is 5 people we are preparing for baptism on may 15. Pray for pani zemankova to have a good experience at church tomorrow she didnt have the greatest experience at relief society and she was disappointed she thought it would be better than that. Kenneth is doing well he found out that he is getting accepted for a visa to america and he is going to be working on long island for 4 months leaving in july to go there but he is very excited because that means he will still be in america during October so he wants to fly over to utah and go to general conference live and it was great to see him so excited about his baptism and general conference. We were talking with him and he said he was talking with his mother who lives in Virginia and that she started investigating the church as well there and really enjoys it. Samuel is an executive for Hewlett Packard here in prague but is a very humble man and he loved the plan of salvation and the restoration video.

We took the new missionaries on their walk around prague and it was great to see their reactions, none of them had ever been in europe before and they were all astonished by the beauty of the city some times we as missionaries take it for granted that we are living in the most beautiful city in the world but i am trying to appreciate it as much as possible. Like the other day i was contacting and i look up and there right in front of me is the dancing building which is this famous architectual building. prague is definetly starting to grow on me as my favorite city here in the czech republic.

I am also starting to get my business czech down, i had to renegotiate a insurance policy on the phone yesterday when i was in brno it definetly stretched me but i saved the church over 2000 krowns and a lot of money in future insurance policies. Businesses here are funny, they still have such a communist approach to doing business where they don't care about their customers and it doesnt matter to them if you leave, I tried some capitalism on them where I showed them how much money we are giving them on an annual basis and how we will continue being customers for a long time but that they needed to allow us to cancel policies if missionaries end up not coming or pushing them back if they are visa delayed which they hadnt been allowing us to do and if they didn't we would take our business elsewhere and it worked. it was funny to see the look of shock on the guys face and he was like uh uh you do have a point ill talk with me boss and they decided to change.

I also learned how to get a bid on a new car from a dealership . oh the things you learn while serving in the office, my favorite part about serving in the office is the opportunity it gives me to serve other missionaries and help them out and we still get to do quite a bit of missionary work which is a great blessing.

I love you all and I love the opportunity I have to serve the Lord now, it is pretty easy when you are in the most beautiful city in the world with people as great as the czech people. have a great week and have a great anniversary mom and dad next friday.

love
Elder Hatch

President and Sister Slovcek's Birthday Celebration

The Prague District missionaries made a fabulous lunch and entertained President and Sister Slovacek with a birthday song and dance. Elder Hatch is in the back row, red shirt, 2nd from the right

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

Hello family,

Well this week we had quite the miracle take place. So our judge came to conference on sunday and loved it sat with her member friends and than we had a meeting with her on tuesday that had quite the ending to it. After our first meeting with pani zemankova (the judge) elder mittanck and i sat down to think about who could be her member friend, the name came to my mind and to his of sister cankova a very solid older woman in the branch neither of us had ever taught with her before but we gave her a call and she said she would love to teach with us and her husband would come too. We had the meeting last thursday with them which went great they got along well, the cankovi took care of her at church on sunday sitting with her and introducing her to people, pani zemankova invited us all out for tea after conference so we talked about the sabbath day and she understood. So on tuesday pani zemankova brought these cakes and tea and after our meeting we had a little tea party sister cankova and pani zemankova got to talking more and they found out that they were both from the same city. Then they found out each others maiden names and lo and behold they are cousins and grew up together, they hadnt seen each other in 20 years and didn't recognize each other and both had married in that time but it was nice little family reunion and they spent some time catching up, on thursday they brought pictures of them together when they were younger, the Lord definitely had a role to play in us deciding to teach with sister cankova.

We got another baptismal date with a guy named kenneth from nigeria, we showed him the restoration video and it just clicked for him, he has already been to church a few times and he loves the restoration now we are teaching some of his friends as well and when they all heard the plan of salvation for the first time they were blown away saying this is so simple but powerful and makes perfecet sense no man could of come up on this on his own and they are all getting into the book of mormon.

Our cuban family is doing well they came to conference last sunday and liked it, at the building we had conference going in czech, english, spanish and mongolian. Yesterday was fun we went on a office trip to cesky raj (bohemain paradise) President and Sister Slovacek came with their daughter heidi (who reads my blogs so i have to be careful of what i say) the two senior couples the office elders and elder mittanck and i. It was a really fun time there is this castle up on these cliffs with all of these rock formations around it that we hiked through and climbed up on and then we had a picnic lunch and drove around to see some other castles. It was a great time being with everybody, The slovaceks and the senior couples are all down to earth people and fun to be around and talk with, plus they fill me in on the sports world. The weather was nice and my white skin got to see some sunlight.

Another fun experience we had last week that i forgot to right about was that we were invited to a members house for fhe, it was a group of older people and they invited a young couple and my companion and i as well we got to the apartment and the man was showing us around it and took us to the balcony and it was right on the vltava river overlooking charles bridge an amazing view, he was telling us how he doesn't use this apartment except for dinner parties and letting vistors stay there when they come in town, the assistants and "his missionaries" and in the past he always lets them stay there when they come back to visit but he told us he was selling it so he would have to end that. i will send home a camera chip on monday sorry i havent done it for a while life is really busy here but i am taking pictures. also i will be using a different email for the last two months of my mission it is jhatch@myldsmail.net a new and improved myldsmail so if you could send your emails there that would be great. have a great week everybody.

love

elder hatch

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

hey family,

We had a lot of great experiences this last week, i was in the office and somebody called so i picked up the phone and started talking to this woman. She told me that she had been researching our church and likes it and wants to become a member and asked what she had to do to become a member. So we met with her on Tuesday and she had all this information with her about us and knew all of the articles of faith and the story of the restoration. we asked her how she found out about us and she said she was reading an article about John Heeder (i guess he is the guy from napoleon dynamite) and it said that he was Mormon and she was like oh i have never heard of that church and so she started looking us up and liked everything about it. She is a judge here in prague and she kept on telling us that her country needs our church and asked us if she could help spread the message somehow. We had another meeting with her on thursday and had a great couple here in the branch come and teach with us, she had read about 14 chapters in the bom by then and had quite a few questions but she made a goal to get baptized on May 15th and will be coming to conference tomorrow.

Our cuban family is doing well we taught them twice this last week, there is a member here from america with his family who served a mission to chile and he has been going and teaching with us and translating for us, it has given me a desire to learn spanish when i get home they should all be coming to church tomorrow as well.

We gave another baptismal date for may 15th with a woman named katka who has been coming to church for the past 3 months. Last night we taught a mongolian who is a friend of a recent convert and so we taught another lesson through a translater, mongolian is a pretty forgein sounding language but its funny because there is no word for baptism in mongolian so they just put the english word as it, same with jesus christ so its funny listening because you are hearing all these different noises and then baptism.

We had a scare last night, we came into the office at 6 to pick something up and the office elders were freaking out because there had been all these people calling the office saying that they hadn't recieved copies of conference which we had sent to all the branch presidents on wednesday, but i guess it was either somebody prank calling or one of the elders not understanding czech well because we called all 15 branch presidents and they had gotten them which was a good relief.

I have been working with one of the office elders helping him lose weight, so far since i have been in prague he has lost 25 pounds, my goal is the opposite and that is to gain weight so far i have successfully put on 10 pounds.

It sounds like you all saw the video of our birthday dance that we did last saturday for president and sister S. Somebody asked if sister slovackova is somebody different from sister slovacek, in czech with the woman their last names end with ova so alot of times we call sister slovacek sister slovackova. Everything is going well here, the nice thing about being in the office is there is so much going on it keeps you from getting trunky. Another funny thing about being in prague during tourist season is you get stopped by members from around the world on the streets. I am looking forward to watching conference and receiving that guidance that comes from it.
have a great week

Love,
Elder Hatch

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

Hey family and friends,

Another successful week has come and gone hopefully I can remember most of the good stuff to tell you about. Last night we had a great experience, last week I contacted a guy who turned out to be from Cuba, really nice and I got his number. He said he would like to meet, we tried to set up a few meetings but things kept coming up and then last night I called him and said could come on over to his place and meet his family. His name is jose and he is 23 and has only been in prague for 2 months or so studying. we got to his place and it was his dads birthday and they invited us in and were so nice to us his parents and older sister were there, the parents know a little czech but no english luckily we had brought finding faith in christ in spanish with us and they loved it. The mom and daughter are coming to church on Sunday. Unfortunatly, Jose and his dad have to work but they said that next week they will all come and they told us that we can come over to visit them any time we want. Fortunatly there is an American member here in Prague who served a mission to a spanish speaking mission so he is going to come help us out. (by the way spanish sounds really foreign now) In olomouc i bought a book learning Spanish from Czech so i might start studying that.

So april fools was this week, and Elder Mittanck and I played a joke on the mission. There had been rumors going around that Elder Holland is going to come here to visit, he is pen pals with Sister Slovacek and he told her he was going to try and make it out here before they go home. So we sent a text message to the whole mission saying that Elder Holland is coming to visit on april 28th and that we will be having a mission conference in Prague because of it. About half the missionaries sent back texts saying haha real funny its April fools day, quite a few missionaries believed it but then we sent out a text a few hours later clearing it up. President Slovacek saved us from a joke by Sister Slovacek, she was going to steal our car and hide it on the other side of town so we would think it had gotten stolen.

This last week we went out tracting by the branch presidents house because we want to get a solid family, they live a little outside of town in a really nice neighborhood. We went out and there were all these chautouxes and villas out there it was pretty interesting tracting. This whole week we were in prague which was a nice change to get our area going solid again. The one bad thing about prague is that about 50% of the people are not czechs but are from other countries so we have quite a few non-czechs we are teaching right now. We will be having general conference here next weekend so I am looking forward to that and hearing all of the great talks. Today we are going to play tourist for the day and go see all of the sights in Prague since it is sunny weather.

Oh funny story from Elders Quoroum last week at church, the lesson was on elder bednars talk from last conference on family and part of the talk he said we need to tell our family we love them more often. The teacher said we always hear that we need to tell our spouse and family that we love them more often so the problem probably has not been fixed, so he had everybody turn to the person next to them and practice telling them that you love them a few times, I got a good laugh out of that. So don't forget to tell your family and spouse that you love them. Have a great week and I love you all you are the greatest family a person could ask for.

Love,
Elder Hatch

Pictures from Jordan

We received these photos of Jordan, along with the other 3 Elders assigned to the office. All of the photos were taken in Prague.

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Hey family,

Well we just completed a successful week of zone conferences, traveling and exchanges. Samuel was confirmed last Sunday and is doing well he is excited to get a doctrine and covenants, we are all out of English ones here so we have to order them up.

Last Sunday afternoon we left to Slovakia and spent the night with the zone leaders there in Zilina, they are some really good missionaries and are doing great things in slovakia, funny story with that though, we got to their apartment at like 9:20 at night and we were bringing up all of our stuff from the car in case it got broken into. I knocked on their door and this 23 year old Slovak girl answered the door with a big smile and i saw the zone leaders in the background busy doing something and they looked up and were like hey whats up, you could say I was very confused about what was going on with a woman in the apartment of our zone leaders at 9:20 at night but I quickly found out why, their washer machine had blown up and water was coming up and she was the land lady and was there with her husband who was fixing it, that brought a quick sigh of relief to me.

Zone conference went well there it was the first one but our training turned out really well, it was on teaching people on benches with the book of mormon. When the zone leaders there were doing their training Sister Slovackova was talking with me and Elder Mittanck and was like i have something important to teach you and started teaching us all the different names for womens shoes, President came over and he started naming them off too and told us that sister's had trained him well and that we should pay attention it may help us out in the future.

After conference we headed off to a town called Banska Bystrica to work with the missionaries there and it was crazy because I saw mountains for the first time since I was in Liberec and we were driving through all these canyons and it reminded me of driving in Colorado or Provo Canyon. The work went really well in Banska, we had only about an hour to work that night before it was time to go back to their apartment for the night, we headed out tracting and we got let in to an interesting teaching opportunity. It was an apartment of 5 college girls with 2 strong Catholics, 2 agnostics and an atheist but we were able to teach them all something which they really enjoyed and they went back to teach them two days afterward.

The weather here is finally getting better the sun is shining and its warm out, the elders there didnt have anybody to teach so we spent the whole day finding with them and headed off to brno to spend the night with the zone leaders there and have zone conference the next day, after conference we headed off to ceske budjovice to work for 24 hours with the elders there. Its a beautiful city there but has a reputation of being a "hard city" to serve in, 2 years ago there were probably 8 of those but now it is just down to them. All of the other reputations of hard cities have been broken. We were greatly blessed there and found a lot of cool people. There was one named Miroslav who I am particularly excited to see how it goes. I hadn't had such a powerful first lesson on a bench in a long time with him. After a long day there on Thursday we headed home exhausted, constantly driving and going on exchanges is exciting but very exhausting. We drove 1200 kilometers in 5 days; Elder Mittanck compares it to a life of a rockstar.

We had zone conference here in prague yesterday and its good to not have to worry about that for a little while now. At the end of zone conference the missionaries who will be going home at the end of the transfer give their final testimonies and it was pretty big reality shock because my group will be the next one up there giving their testimonies in 2 months. Time is short so I must work hard. I bought a new study journal on Monday to start over with taking notes. It sounds like everybody enjoyed sea world and six flags there in Texas. have a great week everybody.

Love,
Elder Hatch