July 23, 2012

Dear Family,

  My spanish is coming along well. I'm getting a lot better at pronunciation but I'm still working on memorizing words. I'm forcing myself to always have an hour of language study everyday which is actually helping a lot. Also, I finished to Book of Mormon challenge a few weeks ago in english, so now I'm reading it in spanish! I'm in 2 Nephi 9. Isaiah is hard in english, he makes no sense in spanish!
  Elder Gomez has been studying English since he was in first grade so he too is fluent in both languages and doesn't often find a problem in speaking. The issue we usually clash on is that he can't believe that I'm not understanding what is going on in conversations. He had forgotten what it's like to learn a new language. He kind of understands now.
  Not much to write about this week. Numbers were very low this week. The area has kind of slowed down to a halt. We are contacting a lot of people that simply aren't interested. Mainly we are just visiting less actives. Matt how did you handle less actives? I remember you saying that less actives were your favorite people to visit. We have one boy who will hopefully be baptized this coming Sunday.
  We had interviews this week with the mission president. He told me the reason why I'm with my companion. He told me that I need to learn how to lead. I see his point. I knew nothing about leading when this transfer started. Now I'm pretty good at leading an area! President is smart.
  Learned some fun stuff this week. Got to go to the Jordan River Temple. We also talked with a guy that paints the inside of temple for a living. He gave us some cool gospel lessons to ponder.
  If you all see something that you think could go in the blog, you can put it there. Simply put, there just isn't much to write about. I'll make more of an effort next week. :)

Con amor,
Elder Parks