Mark your calanders!

Mark your calendars so you can be at Sky Harbor Airport to welcome Jordan home. He will arrive:

Tuesday June 15th
, 2010
at 5:30 pm

on British Airways to Phoenix.

Everyone is invited to welcome him off the plane!

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Hello family

Well this week has probably been the most packed week of my life but has been very enjoyable and I had a lot of great experiences, I basically had no time to write in my journal so this will take that place as well. Last monday we were over at the other elders apartment making pancakes waiting for transfer fax when I got a call at about 9:30 from president asking me to be his assistant, I accepted and he told me i needed to arrive in Prague later that afternoon. Well I hurried home and packed all my bags (which was record time for me on packing usually it takes me forever) threw my bags in the car and we drove over to the baliarovi for me to say goodbye and then to the train where we hurried and parked ran with my bags and caught a train at 1:00 heading to prague. Elder Mittank (my companion now) and Elder Williams picked me up and drove me back to the building where we had a little chat and started preparing for the week.

Tuesday morning Elder Mittank and I with President and Sister Slovacek went to the airport to pick up the new missionaries it was a huge group 15 brand new missioanries, we brought them back to the building where we trained them in contacting, ate lunch with them, and took them out on the prague walk. It was a fun time showing these 15 missionaries the beauties of prague. 4 of them are slovak elders and wont ever see prague again so president wanted to make sure they got to see all of the beauties here because Elder Perry really emphasizes that. It definitely blew away the greenies since most of them had never been to Europe before, we had to be on our toes to make sure nobody got lost moving around a group that big. We took them to a place to contact for an hour after we showed them the city and it was great seeing all of these young missionaries nervous about the language step out of their comfort zone and contact people and they were able to see a lot of success. They were all super excited afterward about how great it is to be a missionary which was very refreshing to see the energy and faith of these young missionaries. We took them out for a czech dinner of svickova afterwards and had them home by six o clock to be in bed. we walked them everywhere to wear them out so they could go to sleep early and adjust to the time frame. After we talked all 15 of them into bed we went up to talk to president about the new missionaries and their personalities and characteristics to help him in the process of matching them up with their trainers. I got to meet a few of our investigators tonight real quick and then elder mittank and I had to come up with our training for the trainers who would be coming in the next day. Wednesday morning we got up bright and early to run over to the foreign police with the passports of all the new missionaries to register them in the country. We returned to the building where we had a 2 hour training with all of the trainers. The mission has gotten very young; of the 15 trainers only 2 of them had ever trained before but that went very well.

President called us into his office after that where he asked our opinions on who should be with who. I was surprised by how much he valued our input with the whole process and then we all knelt in prayer and I was asked to pray to see if what we had come up with was right and it was an incredible opportunity to feel the spirit. We matched the missionaries up with their trainers and got them all off to their new areas. At this time the dying missionaries started coming in for their final interview with president. That evening we had dinner with them and were able to take part in their final testimony meeting. 2 of my favorite companions elder roberts and elder nowland were in this group plus a lot of other missionaries who are worked around. It was a great honor to hear their powerful testimonies and see how much they had progressed on their missions and i was able to bear my testimony as well. We had so many missionaries going home we tried to rent a bus to take them all to the airport but it was too late so elder mittank and i woke up at 4 and took all the bags we could to the airport and left the office elders there to watch them while we came back to pick up the departing elders and take them to the airport in three different cars. Sister slovackova baked us cinnamon rolls as thanks for waking up so early which was a nice treat.

After we got them all off we came back and it was back to work, we had to plan leadership conference and then put our skills to use as body guards to go pick up 95,000 krowns in cash from the bank to pay insurance (for some reason people in this country only deal in cash) Yesterday we got up early and hopped in the van down to brno where we had leadership conference. One thing that I have improved on dramatically on my mission is in speaking in front of people, elder mittank and I were responsible for about 3 hours of training yesterday with minimal time to prepare but with a lot of help from the spirit it was a wonderful success.

Today we are having our p-day and something cool is that the plzen branch is coming up here for a baptism today and they are baptizing a guy I found when I was there so I'm happy I get to see that. Tomorrow I will get to see church and than we will be driving off to slovakia. It has been a great week, humbling at times but I was able to feel the support and help of the Spirit all week long. My companion elder mittank is from my mtc group so it is a blast serving with him. everybody have a great week I love you all and I hope to hear from more of you next week

love
elder hatch

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