September 5, 2011

Howdy howdy, Fam and Friends!

Yesterday and today have been absolutely gorgeous, weather wise~ No Labor Day here, but the 1st of September is a national holiday because that's when all the kiddos go back to school. Sis. S (native Latvian, but also Russian mini-missionary) had to go to Latvia to get her health tests and things done so she could complete her missionary application. So, Sis. Uibel came to chill with us for 2 days. Always a pleasure! It would have been more fun if we taught more lessons though, because we were stood up by almost all of the lessons we had at the church xP I don't know if having lessons scheduled at the church building is like more of an excuse for folks, NOT to show up... because usually we don't know their addresses if we just contacted them on the street and got a phone number.

As for working with less-actives, we've made contact with a lot of them, but haven't really been able to teach many of them yet. Many people have no valid phone number on file, just an address, but they're usually not home, so I guess we have to keep stalking some of them. Who knows, maybe they don't even live there anymore. We missionaries are mostly just collecting information so we can clean up the ward list because there is a lot of wrong information on it. Some less-actives might even seem impossible to find if they moved or don't have a working phone number (people change numbers here a lot, it seems), so we've sorta joked about having members do some internet stalking or something to try and locate these people. That sounds like something I'd enjoy doing, but alas, as a missionary, I have very limited internet access :P That could potentially be a very good resource though.

Anne came to church yesterday and so did a less-active member or two that are in our area! Slowly, we're seeing some improvement. We're really trying to work on our teaching skills and we realized that we have a lot we can work on. I really don't know what else to say, and now it's time to jet. Sorry!

Happy Birthday to all the birthday kids and thanks for all of the prayers and support!!

Lots of love,
Courtney

P.S. The mission president just issued an e-mail for the missionaries leaving the same time as me. My release date is actually Dec. 16th, just so you're aware.