Hola familia y amigos,

I love teaching little kids. We went to a dinner appt Monday, and instead of us doing the spiritual thought I decided to ask the 8 year old of the house describe the pictures from the first discussion…we need to take her on splits. She taught it. She even quoted part of the first vision. We taught a 7 year old daughter of an inactive lady later thatnight, her sister volunteered her for the opening prayer, it was sosweet. I didn’t feel like I had anything to teach afterward. But we went through the lesson with pictures and saw The Restoration. At the end we asked her to pray about the Book of Mormon, it went something like this, “Heavenly Father…is the Book of Mormon true?...In Jesus’ name, amen.” Guess what? It’s true. I want to take her on team-ups, too. She could show people how simple faith is, instead of us just trying to explain it all the time.

We went out to visit Le Compton this week. Lawrence is a sub city of Topeka, and Le Compton is a sublet of Lawrence… TRAILER-TOPIA! There wasn’t as much corn as in Toganoxie though. We visited a new convert who was pretty quirky. I say we visited since, we never really said anything for an hour, he just kind of took it away. Well, we did teach two principles, sort of, but between long bouts of very random stories about ex-wives and trucks and how cool the sister missionaries who taught him
were (he was pretty attached). I still haven’t figured out how those sisters found enough silence to teach. It’s a pretty common problem. On one hand, I don’t want to waste the Lord’s time chatting about worldly things, but on the other hand, I don’t want to be rude.

Lisa said Tom mentioned Lawrence was pretty upscale in intelligence for Kansas. It is, just because of KU, and most professor types are agnostic or Catholic, it’s also very hippie Buddist, very low income Pentecostal, and very ultraconservative Baptist/Presbyterian. Not everyone fits in those categories, there’s even more, but I’ve noticed a lot of patterns knocking doors. College towns are interesting. I’m pretty happy we’re not serving in the University ward, poor Elders are barely keeping their heads above water tracting the sororities.

We went to a Mexican restaurant, with real Mexicans last week. El Mescal, it’s kind of like La Carreta or Red Iguana(SLC), upscale but authentic. The Mana was playing and I didn’t do a very good job of pretending to ignore it :-) I miss Mexicans. We made a contact with the busboy, but he's out in Topeka and all the hispanics here work like mad. We’re only teaching one at the moment. I haven’t been able to contact the one who went to church 2 weeks ago. My Spanish is okay, but it definitely has not improved a lot since I’ve arrived here. Not much of an opportunity to speak it. I’m reading el Libro and trying to do Spanish study, but it’s frustrating not having anyone to speak it to other than the rms on Sunday
and Juan Ortega, our one Hispanic investigator who I always seem to wake up. He’s too groggy to understand what I say anyway.

We’ve got an activity we’ve been putting together all week tonight. “The Cottage Meeting,” is a mini fireside where we’ll introduce investigators/less actives to some members and have a short lesson and Sis Cornell will sing and the Lathroms will bring cookies. I takes a lot of time to plan an activity. I hope it works out and gets more people here on Sunday. If not, there’s still cookies at the end. I’ve made
about 40 phone calls though. Speaking of the Lathrom fam. He’s a ward missionary and I love going to that house, because they have homemade ice cream and goats and a tortoise and Sis Lathrom makes good enchiladas, and I get along better with converts. They’re more fun and easy-going with us, because they don’t really know the mission rules :0)

Next week we will be making a lot of return appointments with those we have found tracting and hopefully I can have some really good teaching stories. Love you all! Thank you for your letters and packs of greeting cards. I will use them. The church is true and there’s no place like home. Just tap your ruby shoes three times and you’ll be here.

Con carino,
Hermana Deb