October 30, 2013 "Spanish"

October 30, 2013

Dear Family,

Elder Anderton and I are trying to practice spanish and learn more spanish to help him gain some confidence and so that he can actually speak. Everyone asks him to talk just because they probably are uncomfortable that he new guy never says anything...he gets frustrated when they tell him to talk and he is generally frustrated with spanish. He beats himself up way too much. I know I did a fair share of beating myself up when I was first learning spanish but not nearly as much as he does. The great danger of never saying anything is that your mind wanders and you think of a lot of different things which can make you home sick and can also make it very difficult to focus on the work. I feel like he just spaces out most of the time and day dreams about football and home. It´s a challenge but nothing we can´t overcome. I essentially make him pay attention and almost force him to teach so that he gets out of his shell and opens his mouth.

Our investigator is progressing but still has issues with his ex-wife which is bad and in my opinion is preventing him from progressing. He still holds onto old hurt feelings and he needs to let go and move on if he´s really going to do this all for the right reasons. He quit smoking and drinking coffee in just a week and he hasn´t failed to come to church in over 2 months. He´s doing well but if we don´t figure out a couple little issues then it´s gonna be tricky...

other than him we don´t really have other progressing investigators which has resulted in Elder Anderton learning the joys of tracting and knocking doors. We´ve met many catholics and I feel we´ve had to talk about Mary and why we don´t worship her everyday this week.

Now that I´ve been accepted to byu I´ve been thinking about what I´d like to study and the major that has been on my mind lately has been physical therapy. it just seems right to me. only time will tell...

google may say that the temp is going down here in the D.R. but I would tell you that google lies.

We had an awesome meeting with all the bishops, mission leader, missionaries, and the stake presidency along with Pres. Douglas on saturday where we talked about goals we want to meet befoe the end of the year in the stake and in the stake the leaders put a goal to baptize 50 people and rescue 47 inactive families. needless to say there is a lot of work to be done and it there is no way we will be able to meet these goals if we don´t have member support and if we don´t work with them on a daily basis. the inactive families that we are working with are not progressing with just visits from the missionaries. they need the members. We gotta work!

Elder Hunter Allen Robinson

p.s. sorry this was so long Taft, I know you used a lot of time to read it; if you read it. haha