Monday June 8, 2009

Hey family

Well today was when all the transfer information came out and I got a call from President this morning. It turns out that my stay in trebic is going to be a short one, I am leaving Wednesday for Plzen, I am going to be serving as District Leader there. Plzen is on the far west side of the country and is the 4th biggest city in the Czech Republic I believe. Its about an hour by car west of Prague i think. I haven't served around anybody in the district before but i have heard good things. My companion is Elder Graham and I have heard he is an amazingly nice and sincere missionary. I am sad to be leaving Trebic and to miss out on seeing these people we found get baptized but I know that Plzen is where the Lord wants me to be so I am glad to go. I have gotten close to the members here too they are pretty amazing. Sunday the branch president had us over and than we had dinner at another members house. Today we got up and went to a city called Telc, it is in between Jihlava and Trebic so we went and met there to read the transfer fax. It is a pretty cool city with a big namesti and all these colored houses it is right in between two lakes so it is completely surrounded by water.

The best news from this last week is that Vojtech has accepted an invitation to be baptized. He will be getting baptized in less then 2 weeks on june 20th. He is 17 and has already asked his parents for permission and they have given it. We taught him about the word of wisdom last week and he loved it, he thought it was the best thing ever that the Lord would bless us with this knowledge long before it was found scientifically to be bad for us, he already lives it all his parents taught him it is bad to smoke and drink which is a pretty unique thing here in the czech republic. He has two younger brothers 14 and 11 so who knows what might happen in the future with them.

Ana went to Prague to visit a friend and when she was there she saw a baptism which was a good experience for her. The members are pretty excited for Vojtech's baptism and are very supportive of helping us teach him. One of the sisters in the branch teaches English at a high school here and we found and taught one of her students this week which she was excited to see. We also found and taught twice this week a 17 year old young man who we found out at the end of the second meeting. He is the 18-and-under Czech champion for the 100 meter dash. He was very humble about it. We have another meeting with him this week since he was gone over the weekend for a track meet.

A funny story from contacting this last weekend is we were talking to this older woman probably about 65 and she was telling us about some problems she has had in her life with health issues and we were talking about how the gospel can help us in all situations when we are happy and life is great and also how it can help sustain us through our problems. She was like, you are such nice young men and than she opened up her back pack and pulled out some oven mitts and handed them to us and than just walked off, so we have a brand new set of oven mitts in our apartment.

The weather has been pretty rainy and cold the past two weeks here, a couple of times I have even be wearing a suit with a sweater so it doesn't feel like June, sometimes the sun will come out for a couple of hours and get pretty warm.

That is pretty much everything from this week, a week from now I will be writing to you from Plzen, I looked it up and its a 5 1/2 hour train ride from here so that should be some good time for reflection.

I love you all and hope you have a great week

Love,
Elder Hatch