July 12, 2010

Hey everyone!

Glad you had a good week and that the trip to Aspen finished well! You've become quite the active family! And I'm so happy none of that stuff got stolen! I pray for you all every night so i'm happy to know they are being heard.

As for how my shoes got stolen...its really not that exciting of a story. To get into the appartment/church you have to go through an outer door which we always lock. Then we just keep all of our shoes on the second floor balcony (shoes are not allowed inside the house, if so we would not have the cleanest appartment). So probably while we were sleeping someone jumped the walle, went up the stairs, ignored the ten other pairs of shoes and took my eccos and my nikes and one of my companions pairs. I have no idea why he didnt take them all, theifs really just arent that smart.

Sooo...i dared to go to the GIGANTIC street market today to look for shoes. It was a success and i had fun bargaining along the way. I found nikes that i bought for twenty dollars and eddie bauer brand shoes for another twenty dollars (he asked for seventy dollars to start with and i countered with 14. Ended up at twenty). So if you send forty dollars to the couple that would be great. (Its amazing how cheap everything is here. I also bought three ties for a total of 4.20 dollars).

So this week was just ok. It would have been great BUT Carine went back to the hospital and they say she needs to keep the cast on for another month (again!). So that stinks. We wanted to baptize her with her dad and brother this month but we can wait until next month. All will go well. She took it much better this time. We showed up with food to celebrate but we ate anyway and even joked a little about it. When she finally gets it taken off she'll have been in that stupid cast for over 7 months!

In better news Raul is going better. There was a baptism service on saturday and he came to watch it with us. If we can just get him to come to church regularly he would be great for the branch.

Pierre and Elodie missed church yesterday. You wanna know why? They had bought the eighth season of 24 (they sell that for the equivilant of a dollar here) and had been watching that all last week. Sunday all of their friends were over to watch the last few episodes so they couldnt leave. I didnt know whether to smile or chastize them. Hopefully they will have better priorities next week.

Church was good again yesterday. I was assigned to give a talk and teach Elders Quorum. I couldn't decide on a topic for my talk so i decided just to do what i love best- I told the Restoration Story. I dont think there has been another event in modern history that is more important or touched the lives of more people. I love bearing my testimony of it, as simple as it is.

In other news, the Leavitts found a new chapel for Akpakpa now cuz this one is too small. So in about October the church and the missionary appartment will move. Too bad i probably will not be here.

Haha I keep dry just by wearing my raincoat you sent with me. My umbrella actually broke a couple weeks ago so i should probably replace that soon too.

Theres crime in my area but nothing i'm afraid of. Its usuall small stuff, although there have been two armed robberies not too far from us. As far as like being held up or something like that, i've never heard of that here.

Well I hope you all have another good week!

Love,

Elder Bertoch