Successful English Classes & Preparing for a Concert

February 4, 2013

Alright well this has been a bit of an interesting week.

We were able to visit with Scott twice again this week. We were just getting him ready for baptism. It didn't happen this week because he got sick but we are all set for this next Sunday. Lisa and Terrance's son was also sick so we weren't able to meet with them.

The biggest surprise we had this week came in our English Classes. I thought it would be tough to match the success we had in Jamaica. We started the classes on Monday, 9 people. About the same. Then we had our second class on Wednesday, 31 people. What? 31 people in the second class? That's ridiculous. So that is likely how we will be able to keep up our Spanish teaching pool. We aren't doing too much work in Spanish area's anymore because of a few more changes I will talk about in a bit. If we can keep up that much people coming to English class then we will be set for a while.

Anyway the reason that we aren't doing too much work in the Spanish areas is because President Calderwood is really intent on starting a Belle Harbor branch. That is the area in which most of our service was done and they will likely do is just split Far Rockaway in two. Keep all the Spanish in Rockaway and send all the English to Belle Harbor. I don't know that either the Spanish nor the English are ready to fly solo yet, they are barely hanging in there together, although splitting the languages will clear up some of the issues. But anyway, back to the original point, most of our finding activities have been focused in Belle Harbor. We got a list of all the people that we helped out down there (or at least all who requested help, which was only about 75% of them) and that is about 800 names. So we split up the names between the different companionships and we have been looking them all up and just checking up on them, seeing if they need any more help. Most of them are just super grateful and then we tell them that as missionaries, we don't just clean out basements. We haven't had a ton of success yet (most of the people aren't back in their homes yet), but we have met a lot of cool people and a couple that could very well be baptized within a few months.

We have also been preparing a concert to put on down there. The missionaries did a Christmas concert down there that was very successful. That was a very non-threatening, general Christianity concert. This next one we will be teaching the whole first lesson. The script is pretty bold but I think it is going to go really well. Elder Erickson (the unofficial mission pianist) and I are in charge of gathering the music and musicians (we are getting missionaries from all over the mission to come in for this) and the songs will be very powerful. I think it is going to be a big success. I just hope that I am still here to see it. The concert is not til the 24th and because of the shortened transfer, I could be out in two weeks. Oh well, whatever the Lord wants.

Well I think that's about it for this week,

Love you all,

Elder Pearce