The Lord's hand is always in His work.

Yeah it is rough out here. But if we get too discouraged it just makes it harder. We really aren't having too much success and we haven’t had an investigator progressing or even in church for about a month now. But the branch is improving! We finally talked to President Agustin and I think he has more confidence in us and he changed everything that needed to be changed with church meetings and he even started the meeting on time. Hopefully we can continue to improve this branch and have the members help us out a little bit and we will start having success.

Yeah this area is really hard. We are persecuted pretty good too. There are people throwing rocks at the church all the time! At least it’s not like another hard area here called Canlun, where those rocks are thrown at the missionaries. But yeah, we do see our difficulties here. Hopefully we can find success. The thing is that in Santo Domingo, religion is very political and based on families. The people from our church are basically from 2 different families, the branch president's and the elder’s quorum president. So it is hard to get people to leave churches. So we are trying to work with the members to find more of those families and have them change their traditions, but it’s really hard. The most lessons with a member I have had in one week here is 3, and that is just because some kids in some families haven’t been baptized. I have only had one member actually go to one lesson with us ever in the area. So hopefully we can figure out how to motivate them to fulfill their callings as members. I do hope I see success soon though because it is wearing on me....

I haven’t done anything for my ear so far....But it really hasn’t bothered me too much. There is a hospital here in the Tinta. But I bet it is somewhat expensive. But if it starts bugging me I will check it out.

I'm fine with change of the mission president because the Lord's hand is always in His work. I know the new president will do a great job.

So this week at like 5 in the morning a big ol bird flew in the window as I was sleeping!!!! It is like a big raven thing. It landed on my leg and woke me up. And then it flew around my head for a sec so I freaked out! Then after that it flew out of the room. So that was a pretty crazy random event that happened.

Oh and then I was finally able to take a shower for the first time this week yesterday...There hasn’t been water all week!!! I don’t really understand it. We are able to get water to drink, but that’s about it. So that was rough. I took numerous baby powder baths, it takes away the odor fairly nicely! Ha ha!

I really don’t know what else to inform you all about for this week. We have kinda found a couple new people to teach....Well one, Pedro Chup. He seems to understand the importance of a prophet, but I don’t know if he will be willing to change from his church. And he lives really far away. Farther than Rosalina. He lives like 1 and a half hours from the church. So that might be a difficulty with him, but if he is able to show his faith and come to church we will be able to baptize him. So we shall see what happens with that. Hopefully it all turns out well.

Dang Lehi always loses before the championship huh! But still, they did make it way far, so I give them props. Elder Turek told me about Davies right as I was reading what you said. That sucks a lot for BYU! Hopefully we will be able to recover and not keep getting beat...Dang. Jake’s team couldn’t pull it off only because they are juniors...they probably played a senior team who knew they couldn’t lose to underclassmen, so it’s all good. Jake can probably take it next year as a senior for sure. I know he will! I love you Dad and thanks always for the sports updates!

It’s crazy that there is only 1 week left in this change. Tomorrow we are going to Senahú for a meeting so this week will go by even faster! I will most likely stay in Santo Domingo for another change, but you never know. But I feel that I will stay. Welp! I love you all and hope you all have a great week!

Keep the Faith, Stay Strong
Kawaq lee paab'al, Kawaq eerib'
LOVE, Nekexinra
Elder Jordan Smith, Laj Q'anjorin