Language Translation and Bed Bugs

I am happy to announce that two more people I was working with in Greenwood I found out yesterday were baptized! hurray!

Transfer calls came last Saturday night. Not much change, except that one of the Spanish missionaries in our district is leaving and being swapped and two more English missionaries are coming putting our district at 12 (remember, before this transfer the largest I've had a district is 4 people), which probably means the Spanish elders are going to move back into our apartment. Hurray! But we're going to loose the car back to the Spanish probably. (It was expected, but booo!)

Elder McGuire has been sick most of the week so I have had very long extended studies which is really cool, but unfortunate at the same time...

I think I told you before already, but my ward and a couple other wards here are about to split up too, it'll be interesting to see how it all divides out; I think I told you also, that our Crowfield ward is probably only going to grow in numbers because our boundaries are so small already (however we have many many solid members with more than 50 active elders so maybe not.)

So, let us see... this past week I went on a day exchange with the Spanish elders, he taught me how to spot Spanish households and it held true every single time. A Spanish house will have one on the following: a pink bike in the yard. a satellite with two receivers (English and Spanish channels), construction supplies laying around specifically paint, a mop on the porch (don't know why that is, but that was the most common out of all of them), I don't remember the rest, but I know I wrote it down somewhere and I think it was in my journal so it's ok that I don't tell you the rest. It was lots of fun though. One of the lessons we had the mother only spoke Portuguese and the kids spoke Portuguese, Spanish, and English but were the most fluent in Spanish. My companion spoke mostly Spanish to them (some English) because he is a Spanish missionary and doesn't know any Portuguese and I speak English. At that lesson we watched "Finding Faith in Christ" in Portuguese. The next lesson was a family from Mexico and the dad spoke some English, mostly Spanish and knew a dialect of some sort of Spanish (Mistecka?) that I wrote down in my journal too, the son speaks fluent English and Spanish and at least some Mistecka, the rest of the kids speak a little bit more English than the father (because of school I'm sure) but mostly speak Spanish. The mother doesn't speak any English is in the process of learning Spanish (I read the scriptures better than she did in Spanish) and so everything we said was translated by the father to the mother in Mistecka... it took an hour and a half to get through 1 Nephi Ch 1. It was a fun Spanish day.

All the missionaries that were in the North Charlston apartment (Spanish and North Charlston elders (4 of them)) have been bit by bed bugs, they had a severe bunch of them and had their apt sprayed down recently. I was never bit, but apparently they came from our apartment when the Spanish elders left our apartment and went into their apartment. I don't even know what one looks like, so if there ever were any in our apartment they probably died in the room the Spanish elders were in in our apartment because nobody has gone into that room since they left beside to vacuum it.

We haven't had many dinner appointments with the member recently, but there is a "red box" that is kept in the kitchen at church that members put food in for us to take during church. They have given us a lot of food, our cabinets are full of mostly uncooked pasta and tomato sauce.

I love you all lots! Keep up the good experiences at home! Sounds like you are all keeping busy.

Sincerely,
Elder Benjamin Ray Walker