Most kids ever in a pool

It's hard to believe that another week has gone by. We are just as busy as ever in the office. We hoped that we would be making less mistakes by now but no such luck. We are wondering how long it will take for President Santos to figure out how bad we are with office stuff. President and Hermana Santos have now been here one week and they have not stopped moving. They have now met all of the missionaries in the mission. They held 3 short multi zone meetings so they could meet everyone. They also held an all day meeting with the Zone leaders and the Hermana training leaders. They are loving and warm and are going to do a great job.

One of the highlights of the week was seeing President Santos call one of the missionaries that taught and Baptized him and tell him that he is now a mission President. President Santos has been unable to find the missionaries that taught his family 30 years ago. He asked one of the assistance if he knew any way to find them. The Assistant Elder Bateman took it as a personal challenge. He found of the missionaries and called him while he was on a business trip. Hermana Santos took a video of the phone call and we were able to see it. It was very emotional to watch this re-connection.

As you can see in the pictures we attended a pool party that was an activity for the primary. It was at the home of a member that is in the other Branch that meets in our building. He owns a baseball academy. These academies identify kids that have the pontial to be big league players and work to develop them. He brings many of the kids in and feeds them and pays all their expenses. When they sign or if the sign a contract with the MLB he gets a percent of the palyers earnings. He has three players in the MLB right now. One of them id Maikel Franco who plays third base for the Phillies. IN back ground of the some of these pictures you can see a pond and some hills. Vladamir Guirero grew up here and now lives somewhere in those hills. He owns the hills.

The pool party was one of the best church activities I have seen, if you measure by how much fun everyone had. these kids played in the pool for 2 hours straight. They NEVER slowed down or stopped having fun. It was smiling, laughing, running, jumping and more laughing the whole time. They pulled the kids out for a minute to give them a sucker. within seconds they were all back in with the suckers. A few minutes later the leaders fed the kids a spaghetti dinner followed by ice cream. Then right back in the pool. It was intense.

On the language front. For those of you who have learned a language you know that making calls is one of the hardest things to do. We needed to order some water for our apartment so I decided to use this as a measure of my language ability. First some background all of the local stores (called colmados) sell water for the local residents. There is a colmado on every corner. Ours is called Colmado Rosario (Madison's Mission name). The water portion is called Agua Liana. (my sisters name). Last time I went down there to buy water he told me how much easier it would be if I just called and they would deliver it. So I decided to call. I "knew" how it would go, I would ask for 3 bottles of water and he would ask for my address and I would tell him the address and then I would say thank you. I did not understand one word he said. This did not stop me however, i pressed forward anyway telling him what I wanted and giving him my address. He said something, Who knows what? I then told him again that I wanted 3 bottles of water and gave him my address again. He said something and I repeated my first request. We then waited an hour and nothing showed up.

Hermana Pajarez is staying with us this weekend so we asked her to order the water for us. She is from Peru. She knows very little English and has been here for 18 months. She not only knows Spanish she knows Dominican. It took her about 5 different calls to be successful. I felt a little better about my failed attempts. President Nuckols said he thinks that the local stores try their best to speak as little Spanish as possible and only speak Dominican slang.

As we work in the office we are trying our best to find ways to help the young missionaries in their work. Sometimes this backfires. This week one of the Elders from Honduras had some money sent to him through Western Union. He needed his passport to get the money. Instead of him spending the day coming into the office using local transportation to get his passport we decided we could drive his passport to him and then take him to Western Union. Well, nice try. We spent about two hours finding them and another hour getting the money. But in the process one of the elders ended up with Hermana Borup's phone. So I then had to drive out and find them again. Sometimes we are more effective then other times.

We love the work. We know we are in the right place. We work hard everyday and get tired everyday but love the work we are doing. We hope we are contributing at least in some way to this great work.