This week was....a great learning experience

Hey Mom!
This week was....a great learning experience. We had a lot of meetings such as Zone Conference and Launching Leaders. I can't remember if I have told you before but there is a senior couple in the mission named the Ritchie's. Elder Ritchie has served as a mission Pres in the Virginia Roanoke Mission back when
there was one and MTC Pres in Gahna and in total they are on their 9th mission right now. Elder Ritchie has been a successful businessman and retired at 35. He is assigned to handle the YSA wards and they teach a class called Launching Leaders. It is all about the how to develop the skills, qualities, and habits to be successful and they are teaching the missionaries this class and gearing it towards missionary work. It is an awesome class! We have a class twice a transfer. So we had that and then we had Zone Conference. That was awesome. We learned a ton and man I just love Pres Riggs. He teaches us so well and you can
really feel the love that he has for you individually.

Other than that, I had a cool experience on Splits with our ward mission leader. Last week we were street contacting and talked with this Lady for just a little bit. She told us how her dad has cancer right now so
we offered to pray with her for him. After she gave us her address and said we could come back to talk with her family. Well when we came back at the set time, she was not available. So we went and tried some other people and then Brother Stark our WML asked if we should go and see try that lady again. When we went back her husband answered the door. They are Armenian and he was telling us all about his religious history (Orthodox) and then asked the Golden question. He says "What makes your church different from mine?" It was a perfect opportunity! Brother Stark and I taught him for like 45 minutes and it was great. But he is so busy that he said he wouldn't be available for like another month because of the funeral and stuff for his father in law. But he is sincerely interested and kept asking really great questions. So we aren't working with him right now but we are way excited to go back and see if later on.   The sisters gave us a list of single less active men for us to go and try and when we stopped by one we met his wife. It turns out he is deployed in Afghanistan and she is living with her parents right now. But we set up and appointment with her and had to hand her over to the sisters because she is technically in their side of the ward. They went over and had a great lesson apparently so that's good for them. But that's how everything has been here. We haven't really found and work to do and keep hearing about how great the sisters are doing hahaha.  

We did have a really funny experience though. One night we went to McDonalds at like 830 because when we had dinner that night the family didn't make enough food so we were still hungry. Well there was this young couple that as we were finishing up called us over. They asked if we were JW's (Jahovas witness or J-dubs as the elders our here call them) and we explained that we weren't what church we were from. They
then told us how a couple of nights ago the Sisters knocked on there door at like 830 and scared the crap out of them. But they mad us laugh so hard because they were describing the sisters and like acting like them. One is short and just a really REALLY smiley always laughing person and the other is tall and straight faced serious. So we were busting a gut laughing while they were acting like the sisters. Then we talked with them for like 20 mins and the lady was finally like "I think we have been blessed to be able to talk with you guys tonight" as we were leaving. It was a nice tender mercy to have people to talk to that didn't reject us and respected what we were doing and just let us talk to them.

That was pretty much our week. A ton of knocking doors and walking around and trying to talk with everyone. Elder Westover and I are getting along really well though. We are practically brothers. He loves sports as well and so we are able to keep each other positive and not let the other get discouraged. But we are so dang excited for the Nationals game on Friday!!!!!! I'll have some awesome pictures next week!!!!!!

Love you!!!!!

Elder Powell