JUNE 2013

6/24/13

Dear Family,

It was very nice to hear from you all this week.  I unfortunately don't have a ton of time to write because band practice went super long.  I had to write a bunch of harmonies and learn some new songs and all that fun stuff.  It took a while.  Hopefully, once we have everything a little bit more figured out it won't monopolize p-day so much.  It's all going well, and hopefully you'll be able to find Adrian on Facebook so you can see some pictures and videos.

I don't think I've really talked about my ward yet, other than the fact that we don't have a bishop.  Hopefully we get one of those soon. There's a really old blind lady in my ward named Peggy who is in a blind person band.  It's really funny.  She plays the finger symbols, which I could imagine might be a bit tricky for someone who can't see.  It would be really easy to miss!  There's another family in my ward who had us over for dinner on Saturday and they gave me the best tea ever.  The brand is Teapigs and the flavor is Peppermint and Licorice.  It's incredibly tasty tea.  They gave me a whole box of it.  We have this one really crazy member who Elder Baker baptized just over a year ago when he was serving in London North before being AP.  She's a really nice Albanian woman who lives right by the church with her family.  She's an incredibly spiritual person, but she's a little crazy as well.  She just does some really weird stuff.  She has more faith than the rest of the ward put together though.  If you ever want someone praying for you, it's her.  Whenever we stop by her home to teach her daughter Fiona, she tells us she knew we were coming.  It's really bizarre.  She has food waiting for us and everything.  Missionaries have been working on Fiona ever since Lisa, her mom, was baptized and on Sunday she decided she wants to get baptized.  We didn't ask her about baptism or anything, she just decided on her own and told her mom, who called us just ecstatic. Fiona is 10, so it's a pretty big decision to make on her own.  We'll be baptizing her on the 7th of June along with Betime, the other crazy Albanian woman who Lisa played a large part in finding.  Miracles just follow Lisa around.  Betime is really hard to teach because she doesn't know much English.  She wants to be baptized on the 7th, so Elder Baker can baptize her before he leaves, but I'm not sure we will be able to teach her everything by then.  She has a son who is very distracting to lessons as well.  One of us usually ends up watching Leo while the other teaches Betime.  If she gets baptized on the 7th, though, Elder Baker will be doing 4 baptisms that day: Betime, Fiona, and two of our Sister's investigators.  He leaves the next Tuesday, so that will be quite the epic send off for him.

Lisa, Elder Baker, Betime

Elder Baker and Betime's son, Leo

I had my first real interview with President Jordan last week.  He's a really great man.  I really like him.  I'm glad I'm in the band and get to associate with him more than basically any other missionary other than the APs.  We didn't get to watch the big missionary meeting because it was on at 11 pm here.  We'll get to watch it at another time, though.  President called us all and told us what it was about and explained a few things about it.  It sounds like there are going to be some pretty interesting changes.  I totally called the tablet thing.  

Camilla asked about transportation.  We don't have any trolleys, just buses.  We travel almost everywhere by bus and occasionally use the underground.  The other day, this man got on the bus and sat down across from me and I've never smelled someone so vile ever before in my life.  He smelled like a thousand dead cats.  I nearly threw up.  It was really really bad.  I don't really like the buses.  It all just seems super germy and dirty to me.  Every time I sit down on a seat I just imagine the thousand dead cats guy sitting on it earlier that day.  Nasty.

Did I ever mention that my companion in the MTC was named Timothy Green?  I thought you might find that interesting.  To answer another one of Camilla's questions, we do not get to watch movies, and especially not movies like Nacho Libre.  We do quote it every once in a while though.  Ooh, I found SoHo square the other day!  You should look though some My Fair Lady stuff and find out other places they talk about so I can find them.  I'd really like to find Professor Higgin's home.

Anyways, I'm all out of time.  I hope you all are doing well!  I'm glad mom's feeling better and it looks like girls camp was fun and it made me really miss the temple.  I think the first thing I want to do when I get home is drive straight to the Salt Lake temple from the airport and do a session.

Love,

Elder Hein

p.s. if you see any of my friends, tell them to write me!  The only letters I've received are from Tyler Christiansen or you guys.  I prefer letters to emails because I don't usually have much time to reply to emails.  It's also fun to see a letter waiting for you at the door or in the mission office.  Post something on my facebook or something.  Thanks!

6/17/13

Dear Family,

It hasn't been the most successful week ever.  I think about half of our appointments fell through and finding was really rough.  We haven't been able to meet with Thez since our first visit, but we're still trying.  We have another really cool investigator that I really like, though.  His name is Michael.  He met Elder Baker on the bus a year ago, but wasn't interested at that time.  We found him on a bus a couple of weeks ago and he decided to listen this time.  He's really fun to teach.  Some people make it a lot easier to love them than others.  Some of our investigators are really difficult, but Michael is great.  I really hope he keeps progressing.  I've taught my best lessons with him, mainly because he's just really easy to teach.  He's super interested and just a super great guy.  

I have two stories, one of them more on the spiritual side, and the other is just really funny.  

1. Wednesday was a really hard day as far as missionary work goes.  Tuesday was pretty unsuccessful as well, so that made it even a bit worse.  It was like round two of the try and fail all day game.  I think all but one of our appointments fell through throughout the day, and we were having absolutely no success setting new appointments.  People just wanted nothing to do with us.  We just kept working and hoping for the best, though.  It got to around 8:00 pm and we still hadn't set a single new appointment, so we said a prayer and asked to be able to make our goal of 3 new appointments, and we found a guy walking down a street like 5 minutes later who we set an appointment with, and then on the bus home we set another, and someone we had given a pass along card called us and set a third appointment.  It was really amazing.  Our prayer was definitely answered.  We still had a pretty bad day as far as numbers go, but we felt really blessed to achieve what we did.  The Lord directs his work, and we need to always attribute any success we have to Him.  Even though our numbers this week reflect our work pretty poorly, it was a good week.  I learned and grew a lot.  As long as we're working as hard as we can, it doesn't really matter how much success we have.

2. On Saturday we met with one of our investigators, Jean-Leon.  We taught him a lot about the organization of the church.  He used to be Catholic, so he had a lot of questions about the matter.  But that's pretty irrelevant to the story.  It came time to leave, and I was selected to pray.  I said something along the lines of "We're grateful to have had this opportunity to meet with Jean-Leon," but I didn't say Jean-Leon.  I accidentally called him Jean-Valjean.  It was pretty bad.  I quickly corrected myself, but it was still really embarrassing.  Elder Hutchins has been giving me a hard time about it ever since.  I would probably do the same if it wasn't me who said it.  At least I got a good story out of it!

Did you guys get the email from Adrian?  I had him send you an email on my behalf saying happy birthday to Catherine and happy father's day to Dad.  I realized like an hour after sending my last email that I had forgotten those two things.  Sorry about that.  Hopefully you find him on Facebook so you can watch the videos and see some pictures.  There's one missionary in the band who hears in color.  Have you ever heard of people like that?  I had, but he's the first one I've ever met.  He's super cool.  Apparently my voice is peach.  He says that's his favorite color.  Pretty cool, eh?  

The temple is in the London South mission, so we aren't allowed to go to it.  That might change, but for now we can't go.  I always enjoy the Cadee parts of Mom's emails.  They make me smile.  We have this one super crazy investigator who throws birthday parties for bunnies and cats.  You guys might want to try it.  She says she wraps bunny treats in newspaper and then lets the bunnies open them.  Cadee might enjoy it.  She claims it's a pretty great time.  She is absolutely insane, though.  

Those thank you notes you guys sent me to fill out are the worst!  They have sparkles ALL OVER THEM!  I have a feeling you did that on purpose.  I haven't filled them out yet, I need to get on that sometime soon.  I haven't found any Altoids here yet, but they have these mints that are exactly like them, but like 4 times bigger.  They're really good.  They're called Trebor mints.  There's also this white chocolate bar called Milky Bars that's really good.  I think Nestle makes it, but they don't have it in the states.  I got a haircut from this super professional hair dresser in the ward and apparently I've been combing my hair in the wrong direction my whole life!  haha.  Who knew?  It's like a billion times easier to manage now that I'm combing it the right direction.

Well, I'm all out of time.  Love you guys!  I hope you have a great week.  I'm sure I will.

- Elder Hein