HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Hola everybody!

Hope Christmas went well for everyone back at home. It was a little bit strange here for sure, but it was a good experience all in all. It´ll make me appreciate Christmas´s with my family from now on a lot more though, thats for sure. It was great to talk to the family. Sorry everybody back home if I didn´t sound super happy, wasn´t too exciting to listen to, or didn´t seem to care too much about your lives back home. As you all know, phone talking isn´t my forte. But I´m sure i´ll get better. But it was great to hear all your voices. Sounds like everyone is doing great. It was exciting to hear about everyones lives and share a little bit more about whats going on down here.

So today I´m writing a little later. This morning we went and played some soccer and some football with the young men in the ward at 6 in the morning. I think people play that early because its not as hot at that time of day. But the sun and heat was even more ridiculous when you started running around. All of us missionaries were SOAKED. It was gross. So right now I´m super tired and working on rehydrating. But it was really fun. It was actually (believe it or not) the first time I´ve been able to play any sports at all since being in this country, so that was cool. We also went out and ate at the fanciest Chineese food restaurant in the country. It was pretty good. Not like ¨legit¨ Chineese from home, but all you could eat and very different from the food we usually eat.

Random note. I keep hearing that these emails are getting spread around among all sorts of interested people. Just an idea, but that´d be great if maybe you checked the spelling and took out any nonsense sentances. Wouldn´t want to look like too much of an idiot. lol.

Anyways, this´ll probably be a little bit of a shorter letter today. Its wierd because each week there seems to be less to write about just because I´ve been around long enough now that there are things that happen repeatedly that I would have written about before but are just kinda normal now.

But yah. The week was good. Kinda crasy with all this Christmas-ness and such. Last monday we headed in to the office at the end of our regular P-day activities for a Chirstmas activity. We watched the Christmas devotionals, some random MoTab stuff (The Friendly Beasts - Brian Stokes Mitchell...wierd but entertaining), and sang hymns. I finally got a great feeling of Christmas and it was pretty emotional for me. lol. Then we all got on the same bus and went to a fancy meal with the president and missionaries. It was fun because I got to say goodbye to Elder Lee (went home today), and Elder Hansen from the MTC.

The 24th was an interesting day. Its Christmas for the people here (kinda like how newyears is technically on the 1st but we celebrate it on the 31st). TONNES of fireworks, drunks and crasy people. But we still got some work done so that was good. Me and Elder Call sang people christmas songs.

Saturday was great. Talking to your family seems to either make you trunky or more motivated to work hard. I think for the both of us we´re more ready to work now that we´ve got that done with. So that was another great upside of talking to home. A cool thing that happened was that we got to talk to a guy named Amado who Elder Call had been talking to before. He´s the one thats going to help us talk with the native tribe in our area. He seems super legit and wants us to start working with his people now that he´s back from holidays. So thats exciting. We´ll see what happens. Their culture seems very different and I´m excited to learn more about them and see what we can do to help them out.

Sunday was rough. Very few investigators came to church again, all for their various reasons. Kinda frustrating. And then when we went to visit people in the afternoon NOBODY was home. We honestly walked from house to house all afternoon and sat down only once or twice. Ridiculous. But we´re not letting that get to us. We´re just going to keep working hard, doing what we can, trying as many ways to find success as we can, and leaving the rest up to the people and the Lord without getting discouraged.

Got to talk with Elder Patterson shortly on the phone. Sounds like he´s doing great and still has lots of ¨animo¨ for the work. It´ll be fun to hopefully see him in the future. But I got to wish him a personal Merry Christmas so that was cool.

Another random note: I´m continually showing new people I meet the pictures of my family and friends back at home. Just thought it would make you all happy to know that I´m frequently recieving compliments on how pretty and youthful my mom looks, how ¨lindo¨ my sisters are, and what a good looking dog I have. Sorry dad, for some reason not as many compliments coming your way... maybe send me a picture of your best portrait and I can see what I can do. haha. But for reals, they really like my family and say that you guys look great and I´m very lucky to have such a good family. Just thought I´d pass that on. :)

Anyways, thats about all I got time for. Have a great week. It was great to talk. Enjoy new years and all the parties! 2010 was swell!

Love you lots!

Suffering as always (from the heat....lol),

Elder Humphreys