Longest week of my life…

Letter from 4-27-09

my companion- being from my group in the CTM, will go home with me. he, not me, is a trunky monkey sometimes. he pointed out that this week we were in the MTC in reverse. (the ctm was 9 weeks at the beginning and this being 9 weeks to the ...) anyway as we remembered our first week as missionaries we remembered that it was the LONGEST WEEK of our lives. i remember at the end of the first week thinking that i had been there a month. the days seemed to crawl by. this week, we commemorated that week by having the LONGEST week since the ctm. on Tuesday we did the big activity that i told you guys about (a BIG success!). BUT that meant that we were up and out of the house at 8 in the morning knocking doors and doing contacts and that lunch wasn’t going to be much rest either. knocking doors and contacting people in the street has to be one of the most tiring and least effective ways to do missionary work, but a member who hasn’t done it since his mission years ago thought it was a blast - for an hour at least :) we worked those members into the ground, but that wore me out too. when the activity was over the members went home and slept and we kept on doing the same until 9:30. i remember it was dark that night and i was beat tired and all of our plans were shot and we were knocking doors AGAIN. i thought that we were getting pretty close to closing time bc no one was letting us in and they looked like they were sleeping. i asked what time it was, and my comp said guess. i tried to guess low so that i could be surprised when he would say " eight thirty". so i said, "um, like seven thirty-ish?"- he pulled out the cell phone and looked at it and shook his heads, half laughing, half crying and said " nope, SIX thirty."- longest day EVER. the rest of the week we had similar trials and the days seemed to drag on and on- nobody seemed to want us in their house at night.

but the activity was great. we had over 70 men involved. we did 1920 contacts in 4 hours. got over 586 addresses and gave out 1771 pass-a-long cards. now we get the sticky end of the activity- working through the addresses that are mostly lies and lazy people that don’t want anything but a free dvd. (some of the members said some DUMB stuff to the people when they got their addresses. they promised books and DVDS and CDs to people. they told them tons of stuff... well, they did their best. )

the week, other that that, was hard. not much success in the zone either. this week is zone conference and we are going to train about how to listen to the investigator.

MOM- take it easy on the fingers lady. you only have ten. the little punk girl is still a punk, but her sister is acting up now so the mom thinks that the first got better. funny.

DAD- my comp is from utah- he is not a sports guys. playing or watching. BUT a guy in our house is from san diego and today we are going to play basketball together. he loves sports.

ALYCE- PARABÉNS! (that is like congrats in my language). :) cool by me, just so you know.

Love,
Elder Helland