February 1st

Hello once again to all of my family and friends. We have now begun the month of February, and all I can say is wow how the time goes fast. This week has gone by slightly better so don't worry everyone haha.

Anyways, one thing I haven't really mentioned, or that I don't remember mentioning before, is that we have been teaching a few teen aged girls this week, and we had a Baptism this Saturday! We baptized our investigator Kelin, who is a really awesome girl who is 11 years old about to turn 12. She started to listen to the missionaries when we were teaching a less active family (who by the way is now active!), and later on we decided to teach her, and this week she was baptized! It was a really crazy Saturday because there were 3 baptisms, 1 from each companionship here. The room was absolutely full of people and we all did not fit in the room for the baptismal service, but yeah so I'll try to include a photo from that event.

Things with Elder Hansack and I are going better. I'm still having a few problems here and there, but all in all I'm learning how to work it out. I've been really working on getting him to talk more and get to know the people so that he can enjoy himself while he is here. We're not really having any personal problems anymore, but we do have a bit of cultural problems haha, you guys might get a kick out of this one. So we found this new family this week and they are really positive, and we were super excited to find them. They live SUPER far away and it takes about 25 minutes to walk there, but it's worth it. The problem is that my companion Elder Hansack, when he learned how to speak Spanish, he only learned how to speak in Tú form, along with another form called Vos, which is unique to this part of Central America. This form is only spoken between really good friends, and people that..well...have a thing for each other, and us as missionaries are not allowed to speak in this form of Spanish. I never thought we'd run into a problem with this, but Houston...I have found a problem. With this family, they have listened to him talk, and I have tried to correct him, but it's quite difficult. But they listened to him talk, and now they only speak to us in this form. The daughter is starting to flirt with my companion and it's difficult to have a spiritual moment with them because apparently we're just among friends. But yeah, haha so we're gonna be working with that because my companion has a little bit more problems with Spanish than I thought.

Other than that, the work is really growing. I went from being really stressed out because we didn't have investigators, and not knowing what to do to train my companion, to having TOO many investigators and now not knowing what to do with them all! I have a ton a ton of work to do, and my stresses have been converted into a good stress, if you want to call it that.

This week on Thursday we had Zone Conference, and I had a really good time there. We learned a lot about the {secret combinations} of the mission, and getting rid of the Gadianton groups among the missionaries, and how destructive they can really be. I also got to see my trainer Elder Cobo for the final time, because he'll be leaving in March for Guatemala! So I gave him a good hug and he gave me some great counsel. All in all I had a good time and learned a whole lot from the meeting.

Sorry I don't have a lot more time to write more, but I hope everything is going well with you. I love you all and miss you.

Vaya Pues!
Elder Tinkham