May 20, 1012

Hey,

I am also pretty excited to be here. Sounds like Riley is doing a little better with his lawn care. And sounds like some fun work projects. I love doing stuff like that.

But so far it has not been the best start. It rained every day this week. Not just a little bit, is has poured like non-stop every day this week. And on thursday I started to feel really ill. Saturday and Sunday I was probably the most sick I have been my entire mission. I wasn't puking or anything, I think it was a combination of allergies and cold. But I am still so stuffed up, I just feel sore and have no energy and it has been a bit miserable. But I went to bed at 9 last night and I am feeling a bit better this morning. My rule is only take a day off work if I am puking, so I have just been working through it. I think that may have made it worse though. I think if I would have just taken some time thursday to rest I might have never got this bad. Oh well. 

It has actually been a pretty good week work-wise though. We have some awesome investigators here. We have one family, Luke and Louise, who have been coming to church every week for like 3 months. They are getting baptized as soon as they get enough money to get married. They fed us chicken and chips the other night and they are... interesting. But very nice. And they have a 7 year old daughter and a 4 year old son. We also have Steesha, who is 24 and has a 4 year old son and a 2 year old son. She has come to church like the last 4 weeks. She is really solid, we are going over there tonight for dinner. We are trying to get her partner, Jason, involved. He is really nice but so far just isn't that interested in religion. But he is asking more questions and tonight he is really excited for us to teach him the plan of salvation. Steesha will get baptized as well as soon as she gets married. We also have a lady named Holly, also 24 with 2 kids around the same age. She is probably the most solid, as she is not living with anyone so we dont' have to worry about the whole marriage thing. She comes to church every week and has 3 kids, a boy and two twin girls, and wants to get baptized. We have been talking about doing it in the ocean which would be really cool. Steesha and Holly live on the same road. There is this little road with 4 houses on it. Steesha is one, Holly is another, another one of our investigators named Sarah is one of them (but she is also studying with the jehovas witnesses) and the fourth house is a lady named Claire but she isn't interested. And all four of these ladies are friends which is cool. We also have another young couple in their 20's named Sam and Sophie, who didn't come to church this week and I haven't met them yet. But they were at church last week. I think they have a kid. And also Richard and Kelly are another young couple in their 20's with a son (Richard and Sam are cousins) who we are teaching. We also have a guy named John, whose son is a professional boxer, and an Indian guy named Gotham we taught on wednesday. He fed us these Indian sweets that were soaked in sugar syrup and so sweet it made me sick. So we have a lot of stuff going on right now. The ward is usually like 6 active members. The branch president, his wife, the 1st counsellor, and then 3 other people. But we have 3 BYU students who are living here for a couple of months, and the church attendance has been at like 30 the last few weeks due to all the investigators and kids. If only they would get married and join the church...

The other really cool thing is we found this lady named Mary. While Elder Martins (my comp.) and his last companion Elder Anderson were teaching someone in this cafe, one of the waitresses came up to them and just announced that she was a member of our church. They got her info and we saw her yesterday. She is Portugese, she didn't know where the church was and she works sundays so she hasn't been coming for the

2 years she has been on the island. She is 26 and joined when she was in university because she had a really close lds friend. She wants to start coming again though and said she would book time off work. She also took a copy of the Book of Mormon to give to her little sister, who also lives on Guernsey. I guess a bunch of her family lives here as well, and they get together for lunch every sunday. We are going to try to get ourselves invited and try to meet them all. And hopefully find even more people to teach.

So, that is Guernsey. Between seeing all these people and dealing with illness I've been pretty busy. But I also got a rubiks cube and learned how to solve it already. It is pretty fun. We don't ever see other missionaries or have anything to do on p-day/free time so I bought it to stop myself from going crazy. I also got my new suit and raincoat. The suit was literally the cheapest one I could find here.

It was 80 pounds for the jacket and trousers. I thought I would just get a really cheap one and beat it up and then when I am about to go home buy a nice one I can wear back home.

This Sunday the Baral's are getting baptized. It is right after church though. And I obviously can't leave Guernsey ward unattended. But I am going to be at that baptism. We have a mission-wide conference they are flying us over for on Friday. So I think I might ask president to send back one of the missionaries in staines to Guernsey for the day and I stay in Slough with Pettersen and his comp and then the other missionary in Staines goes with the zone leaders. It is complicated, but it is the only way I can see this happening. And I might need to pay for my own airplane ticket back to Guernsey on Monday. But I'll use my own money for that, and I see no better way to spend my money than to be there. Either that or Elder Wood, the senior missionary in Slough, said he would pay for me to come back. So we will see what happens.

Sorry I just have rambled on. I just have so much new stuff to talk about.

Love Elder Steed