Dear, Sweet English

This week was a decent week, and if all goes well we should have 4 baptisms this Saturday.  2 of them our from our ward, and then in a neighboring ward there are no longer missionaries because one of them was waiting for a visa to Venezuela and now has it and is gone and his companion got put with another Elder in a different area whose companion was also waiting for a visa and now has it.  Because these missionaries left, my companion and I have inherited 2 of their investigators who are going to be baptized on Saturday.

What I would really like to talk about, however, is General Conference.  On Saturday, I watched the sessions in Spanish, which sadly is just not the same.  I couldn´t understand much especially because it is rather difficult to maintain the needed level of attention to understand for 2 hours.  To make it worse, they taunt you because when they start to speak, the first word or two are in the beautiful, original, English audio.  Then some random other guy cuts in and starts jabbering away in Spanish.   I was however able to understand when President Monson (or rather the spanish guy who talks when President Monson moves his mouth) announced that the required missionary ages are being lowered to 19 for girls and 18 for boys.  That is huge!  I like this announcement a lot and hope to see some new, young missionaries start pouring in in a few months.

For the Sunday sessions, a lot more people show up at the stake center to watch, so in addition to the projector in the chapel and cultural hall, there are a bunch of TV´s in the classrooms and hallways for people to watch out there.  Another gringo elder and I asked if we could use one of these TV´s to watch in English.  The TV set up guy said,"no" cause they were gonna be needing all of the TV´s.  As conference was about to start and there was nobody using any of the other TV´s, the other gringo Elder and I decided that they would NOT be needing all of the TV´s so we claimed a classroom, changed the feed to English and then closed the doors.  We watched both Sunday sessions in dear, sweet English, and it was spectacular.  I especially enjoyed Elder Holland´s talk and was glad that I was able to understand it.

If you did not get to watch conference, I invite you to watch/read online cause it was awesome.

Until next time,
- Elder Casdorph