New to Raleigh
Well, my 6-month stay in Cary finally ended this last week and I begun a new 6-month chapter of my mission in…Raleigh, NC!! This is the area that every spanish missionary wants to be in…the heart of the hispanic effort. Cary is probably the 2nd best place. So, I have been extremely blessed. As you know, Cary is right next to Raleigh, and we actually covered alot of Raleigh (at least the south-western part of it). And the area I am covering now is the eastern part of Raleigh, including Downtown Raleigh, which touches the border of my old area. So, everything is about the same here, not too much different than Cary. I don’t think I’ll ever be going anywhere remote, country-ish because of the fact I don’t ride a bike (President is very strict about having a limited number of miles). We actually have 150 miles to work with in the month, which is basically nothing. It’s frustrating, I wonder how the new mission president will do about it. His name is President Wallace. Don’t know hardly anything about him. But in all modes, I’ll probably be in the triangle my whole mission or the majority of it…in Chapel Hill and Durham, probably my next two areas.
Well, Being in a new area, I also have a new companion of course. And he is Elder Monforte from Mexico! The thing about him is he only has 1 transfer left, so I get to be with him as he prepares to go home…what a great priviledge for me! He’s a stud though, still working hard, still enduring until the end. We actually have a baptism this next week of a family of 3…it’s pretty sweet. There are a lot of things to do here in Raleigh. The biggest challenge are retaining the members who are inactive. There are tons of less-actives, because the people get baptized so fast and there is not enough support. The members here have very little experience in the church, and for this reason, it is very unorganized. The member list has tons of wrong numbers and addresses because there is no secretary who takes care of it. It’s pretty bad, that’s the one big weakness of the branch I have seen so far. If the majority of the less actives would come to church, this would be a ward by now. I’ve already met alot of the members, they are sweet. The branch president is from Argentina, he’s pretty cool.
Well…days seem like they are flying by right now…already have one week in Raleigh. The weather has started to get cold again for some odd reason. It was in the 80’s last week, but now it’s in the 50’s again…brrr. I got a pretty bad sunburn last week playing tennis. It was nice weather. We also went to the RBC Center and the NC State Football center last monday, it was sweeet. I got video of a Carolina Hurricanes hockey practice. I wish we could have done that tour sooner. I’m also looking forward to doing other things like that here in Raleigh. There are a bunch of tourist sites that I would like to see during preparation day. Also, we got to go to the Reorganized LDS Church. I won’t say alot about that, just that fact it has absolutely nothing to do with our current TRUE church.
Well, sorry about the lack of letter
I’ll try to do better next week
Later, Elder Hardy