When I look back on this last week all I can think about is how incredibly hot it was. I was boiling for a while. It's a lot harder to stay focused when you are talking to an nonmember and you feel a drop of sweat roll down the entire length of your back. I'm not sunburned for some reason, I think it was so hot that my skin just skipped burning and went straight to cancer, haha. And the tough part is we didn't have very many appointments this week; we had 27 hours spent finding out in the heat. Elder Bennett keeps telling me that all the days with really intense weather you go through make your wife hotter.
Yesterday the branch organist informed me that we would be singing a duet in sacrament meeting on August 15. That will be interesting to say the least.
Even with 27 finding hours we've still had some success. I think we gave away 5 copies of the Book of Mormon this week, and we have 1 new investigator. And new investigators have been really hard to come by. We make so many appointments every day, but we'll show up for them and there won't be anyone home. You can imagine our excitement when we show up to an appointment and the contact is actually there and lets us inside. It's only happened to me like 3 times here so far.
I'm keeping a list of all the nationalities I've met. I'm at ~15 countries so far. I'll probably type them all out like 21 months from now, haha. I forgot to mention that last week I sent an email on Tuesday because zone conference was on Monday, and the changes that the mission president told us about he's decided to implement 3 months before the rest of the world's missions will.
This week Elder Bennett and I got into an argument about evolution. That's not a very good thing to do. I was trying to tell him that the Church's official stance is neutral but he doesn't believe me. And I don't have time to look it up on LDS.org so we'll just have to go without it.
There's a man named Gordon that lives in our apartment building and waves to us every morning. He has a gaping hole in his throat from a recent surgery, it's probably the size of a nickel. He presses the hole with his thumb when he wants to talk, and it makes weird suction noises. His voice is really really hard to understand, and his front teeth are rotted away. Yeah, it's really gross. But we gave him a Book of Mormon and a Bible when he asked for it. He's really nice. Gordon is my anti-drug. Don't smoke, kids.
Also this week we met this guy that said he one the lottery back in '89. He had been living the same way for 50 years, though, and didn't want to change at all. So now he lives alone with his dog and he's planning on just giving the money to his kids. He won't tell us how much it is, so I assume he's telling the truth. Well, maybe. He got mad at us when we started talking about religion, and then he didn't want us to leave. He's a really lonely guy. Money doesn't buy happiness.
I think I will write down stories about all the cool people I meet and experiences I've had and keep them in a box under my bed labeled "For my biographers."
Anyway, good luck back home, thanks for the letters, and I love you all.
--Elder Wade
