Happy Birthday Scott!

Bon tardi!

E siman aki tabata hopi bon!  Haha, I have to try to keep practicing my papiamento.

This week was a good one, just another busy one!  Sorry that I couldn't write until Tuesday, we were pretty busy on Monday because we had Parque del Este.  But then too at the end of it Elder Green, one of the Assistants, got into a collision with one of the other elders at the end of the soccer game and hurt his shoulder a little bit.  So we were trying to take care of that for a little while on P-Day, and then we had to go and eat, and then it was already time to head out, so we had to email on Tuesday.  But Elder Green is fine now.  In fact, if you can ever find his mom or Elder Jensen's mom on the missionary moms website/list, it would be cool to be in contact with them.  Elder Green is sweet, and so is Elder Jenson, and we are with them a lot. It's a really good time and a great blessing from the Lord to be able to work together and live together.

Man, Scott's birthday is tomorrow!  Happy Birthday Bob!  Wow, for the next one, I'll actually be there!  That will be sweet.  Be sure to tell me where you went to eat buddy!  I hope you have a great day, and I love you!

 

Wow, I cannot believe that we have that many missionaries out from our ward now!  How many is it now?  I think I count 14, and with three more, that would make 17, wow!  (Henry sent Jeff a picture of the board on the wall by the Bishop's Office that has a plaque for each missionary that we have out serving from our ward.  We have 14 missionaries out right now and three more preparing to leave before Jeff gets home so right before he finishes his mission we should have 17 missionaries out from our ward at one time!  Crazy!)

I truly do love the opportunities that we get to do errands to get to go out to different areas and see different parts of the country here in the Dominican Republic, it really is a sweet deal and a great blessing from the Lord.  I love getting to see all of the different places!  This weekend, we will actually be going out to another campo place called Quisqueya.  It's actually kind of like the neighbor of Los Llanos out in the campo.  One companionship had been covering Los Llanos, Quisqueya, and Consuelo, another campo town that is out there.  Now they put missionaries in Los Llanos, and so now there is a companionship that covers Quisqeya and Consuelo.  One of the missionaries there is actually Elder LeSueur, who is from Arizona, he went to Westwood if I remember right.  

 

The Lord is really helping to get things organized and more efficient here in the finances part of the mission.  We are now going to start the process of getting gas credit cards for the mission vehicles and make it easier on everyone (especially the islands) to get gas.  Now the islands won't have to call me to put gas money on their cards, and the assistants here won't need me to fill up their car all the time so that I can pay for it with the mission credit card.  Also, I am now going to start the process of setting up automatic payments called "area adjustments" so that I can assign an amount of money to specific areas of the mission and be able to give missionaries their "pasaje" which is basically like a bus fare (although I wouldn't really call those things buses as we think of them, haha) automatically by giving money to any missionary assigned to an area in a set amount that will be used for their bus fares.  Things are going well in the finance area and I am really being blessed by the Lord and loving the work that I am able to get done here in the office.

Jessica kind of told us that she doesn't really think that she's going to be interested in learning a lot more about the gospel, but that's fine, we found some new people this week, and they came to church.  James came again, and he is doing great!  He comes to church faithfully, and reads the Book of Mormon faithfully as well from what I have seen.  We hopefully could have some baptismal dates by the end of the week.

We had a visit from President Gonzalez of the Quorum of the Seventy on Saturday for all of the missionaries, it was sweet.  I actually offered the opening prayer, so I got to sit on the stand for the whole meeting because of that, haha.  There is another meeting on Saturday evening with Bishop McMullin, who is the Presiding Bishop if I remember right.  So that should be sweet too!

(Since Jeff gets to pick up the new missionaries as they come in to the DR we asked him how they look and how they seem when they arrive.)  The new missionaries that are coming in look great.  They really seem excited and pumped up and ready to go!  They all seem well prepared.

I attached a couple more pictures from our last campo trip when we went out to Higuey.  One is of either a country club or of the La Romana Airport, can't really remember, haha.  Sorry, none of them are very good.  I'm starting with my new memory card, so I'm going to try to send my old one home.

I am doing great here and being blessed by the Lord every day and every week.  I am so grateful for His perfect plan and His perfect love.  I will forever be indebted to Him for all the blessings that I have and have received.  I truly am blessed beyond measure.  I know that the Lord loves us and knows each one of us by our names, and that He sees divine potential in us, that we all have great worth to Him, and that He can work miracles through each one of us as we try our best to keep the commandments and to follow the example of His Son.

I love you all!

Elder DeSpain