April 27, 2015

Dear Family,

It has once again been a pretty good week! Not anything too crazy has
happened but I'll get right into it. We had a zone blitz recently.
Where all the missionaries in the zone do work for just one area and
help them find and visit less actives. But we didn't do it for an
English area. We blitzed the mong branch. The mong people are like an
asian ethnicity and for some reason or another a lot of them have come
and settled in northern California. There's only like 3 or 4 missions
in the United States that have mong speaking missionaries.  There's 3
mong branches here in my mission. It was a pretty cool experience. I was
on exchanges with a missionary who spoke mong pretty fluently. We were
able to get into a couple of houses and although I couldn't understand
a word that was being spoken the spirit was still really strong no
matter what the language. The dinner was a big culture shock as well I
ate a lot of food that I really had no clue what it was. haha But I
survived and it was a pretty good day.

We met with Duo a couple of times this week and she's as excited as
ever for her baptism on May 9th. Since our mission president speaks
Chinese he said he wants to join us for a lesson or two before her
baptism.

We have an investigator named Eric as well. Eric is a good guy and
Sunday night we had one of the best lessons on my mission. Just a lot
of tears and testimonies were shared. Eric is trying to change his
life around and is going to be on probation for another year and a
half. Usually the way it works is for someone to be baptized they
usually have to be off of probation. But we've talked with our mission
president and in this situation he's gonna interview him and send a
request to the first presidency to get approval to be baptized so he
doesn't have to wait that long. Whether they accept it or not isn't up
to us but hopefully Eric can get baptized soon. His testimony of the
gospel is just super strong.

Just a random side note we've been working with people in the church
and organizing early morning basketball. There's been tons of
nonmembers and a few members going to it and its been a super
effective way for us to find some people to teach.  We had like 15
people come last time and only like 4 of them were members its been
super cool.

All 4 of us in our apartment  are trying to stay healthy and it seems
like we've all been sick and we're trying to recover. The Spanish Elders
got food poisoning and it was pretty nasty and me and Elder Hudson
have just had a little bit of everything.

Elder Rosenbaum