Area Changes

Dear Friends and Family:

Elder Felkins transferred and trained, but at transfer meeting we found out that that meant that our area was splitting. He now has the south part of the Miami Shores Creole area - his new area is called Miami Beach Creole. Me and my new companion, Elder Fisher, are still in Miami Shores Creole, although our own boundaries have changed a lot and so now it's not even close to the way that it was when I started my mission here.

Our area now covers just the ward, not the branch. This is unfortunate, because all of our current investigators had been in the branch. So, I don't know what has been happening with Steve and Gasner, who we were teaching before the area split. And Elder Fisher and I have been working hard to try to find new investigators.

Our area also expanded more to the north. We now cover all of the new Fort Lauderdale Stake, although we only attend the Miami Shores Ward, which is the new Haitian Creole magnet ward for the stake. This means that our area now includes the temple! Yay! And our area still includes the Krispy Kreme on 6th avenue and 167th street! Yay again!

At the moment, we have two progressing investigators who we are very excited for. We found both of them this week.

First of all, Raymond F. Two days ago, we were knocking, and we knocked into a member's apartment. Viola F. was baptized in Haiti, but she hadn't been to church for several years. After she went inactive, she married her husband, and only recently they moved to America together. They have one baby boy, who keeps vomiting when they try to feed him, and who cries almost constantly when he is not sleeping, and the doctors have no idea what is wrong with him. Viola Francois was praying for help when we knocked on her door. We prayed with the family, and we invited them to come to church. She took this as a sign that God wanted her to start going to church again, and she and her husband came to church yesterday! (They were there late, and we didn't see them come in, so they missed our ward's sacrament, but somehow they were herded into the Spanish ward's sacrament after going to Sunday school, and so they saw the sacrament!) Raymond Francois is excited to be baptized. He has a soft date for this Sunday.

Also, Jean P. came to church, but he was too late to see the sacrament, and we didn't think about trying to sit with him in the Spanish ward's sacrament meeting, so he didn't see the sacrament but he's still very excited to work towards being baptized on the 7th. The sisters knocked into him, and he called us asking for us to come over and teach him. We were happy to oblige.

As for my new companion: I love Elder Fisher a lot, and I am excited to keep working with him. He is a very good influence, and he makes me want to keep working harder and to see more and more incredible miracles. He was born in Canada, but he moved to California when he was five, so at this point he's probably more Californian than he is Canadian. He likes to collect bugs, freeze them to kill them, and then stick needles through them to make them form a pose until they dry up, at which point he takes most of the needles out and he has a dried up trophy. Yesterday, while we were waiting for my food to cook in the oven, he went and caught a huge banana spider in our back yard, and he is keeping it in a large jar on his desk. It's still alive, for the moment.

Thanks,