Week 83 - January 18, 2016 - Hyderabad, India

What a week!  We celebrated Sankranthi this week and all the schools got the week off.  That means a lot of people went to celebrate in their village but it didn't matter too much for us.  I went on exchanges again (I think I've gone there at least 5 times now) and had a good time visiting the families there.  I still tell everyone that that place is the promised land for missionary work.

Then on Saturday, President Berrett came to Hyderabad and we had a really good zone conference focused on using time wisely.  4 days before the conference he had all of us keep track of how we spend every 15 minutes then in the meeting we put all our time into different categories.  Everyone had a lot of the same results, more time for traveling, less for proselyting so he suggested that we make our travel time into proselyting time.  Only focus on one area a day and talk to as many people there as you can.  Look for the Christian homes and find near the homes of the leaders.  Then we talked about the vision for all of our areas and it was tough to decide what our area can do because now there is not much going on but we believe we can help change that.

Then from about 4:30 to 8:30 the Mission President came on exchange with us.  We walked from the church to the bus stop and when we got to the place where we needed to get down, President Berrett decided to jump before the bus stopped all the way so he almost took a tumble but he was ok.  Then we took a share an auto to meet one of the members near to our investigators home.  When we got there, they started bringing a bunch of snacks even though we told them we had a big lunch.  Then he takes over and starts talking to them, husband and wife, about why the Book of Mormon is so important.  Then somehow they start kind of arguing to each other and next thing you know they are calling each other out for things that they do in front of us.  Anyway, it kind of turns into a marriage counseling session with President Berrett for the next 30 minutes but things got a lot better.  They almost fooled us into drinking coffee which looked like milk with boost so that would have been funny.  Then, we walk about 14 minutes to a less-active home and taught them the importance of keeping the Sabbath Day holy.  And finally our other investigator invites us to her home just like 4 minutes away by walk and we also had a really awesome lesson.  What I learned is that President used little clues to start a conversation with them and tie it back into something gospel related.  He also helped them to find the answer rather just telling it to them.  Much more effective.

Only bad thing is that out of the 3 families we taught and committed to come to church the next day, none of them made it.  Pretty hard to decide on what to do next even when the presence of President Berrett can't get them to come but oh well.

This week, we are going to focus on finding the new investigators and help build up our teaching pool so we can have more appointments.  Today, we visited Birla Mandir and it was really cool.  Everything was made out of white granite and they kept it really clean.

Love you all,

Elder Wakefield