Saturday, March 13th, 2010

Well Prague is as bustling as ever and unfortunately still cold, one of my favorite ways of starting conversations with people on the metro is asking them when spring is going to come, for some reason that just instantly softens there heart. We had two big events on the plan this week, the first was a visit from Elders Teaxue sp? and Richerdson. Elder Teaxue is in the first quorum of the seventy and is in our area presidency here in Europe and Richardson is in the Sunday school presidency, their visit was for the members and not the missionaries but Elder Mittanck and i were able to interact with them and they are wonderful people and very humble even though they are very successful in life, I guess Elder Richardson teaches religion at BYU and he invited me to take his class and that he hopes to see me there when i return to BYU. So we had to get everything in good shape for that and tidy up our office.

We were also given notice that the area presidency will be coming here after general conference for a big sit down with President to find what has caused the great increase in success here over the past 2 1/2 years for a report they will be giving to the Quorum of the 12.

We started something new here that we call "training camp" or "progression seminar" basically we brought in all the trainers and new missionaries to brno and worked with them, for a big part of it we split the trainers and greenies up and the trainers had a question and answer session with president and his wife while we practiced a lot of different scenarioes with the new missionaries. After lunch Elder Mittanck and i trained on comp study and comp language study and we heard some great talks from president and sister slovacek on building faith and raising our vision to see ourselves as the Lord sees us. This was kind of a trial run to see how successful it was and everybody loved it so we are going to be continuing it in the future.

In our area our man samuel is going to be getting baptized this next saturday, he is from camaroon, he had been taught in brno but moved to prague the same time that i did and one of my missionary friends in brno passed him over to me, he is working on his phd in international relations here and is a very humble guy. We also found this sweet girl from spain named noele, i busted out the 3 or 4 spanish phrases i know, luckily she speaks english she also just moved to prague about 3 weeks ago and she is coming to church tomorrow we should be getting a pretty good turnout to church tomorrow 6 or 7 people, even though we only get about 4 and 1/2 hours of missionary work a day we are still seeing alot of success.

This weekend is the youth and ysa temple trip and so they all came into prague and had a fireside and slept in the mission home before heading to the temple early this morning, it was great to see all of the youth and ysa i have come to know well and become friends with, its kind of weird thinking about it i dont really have any friends in america anymore that arent my family or former missionaries here it seems like i have a lot more friends here in the czech republic. Vrata was there last night and he was way excited to be going and doing baptisms for the first time, the youth and ysa have a great bond together here. One of the drivers of one of the vans got sick at the last moment so they needed another driver, i volunteered but unfortunatly that was shot down rather quickly.

My personal study lately has been largely made up of the New Testament and Book of Mormon it is amazing how great those work together and its amazing the power you get from reading your scriptures in the morning that continue throught the day, sometimes because of things we have to do we dont get our personal study until the afternoon and there is a noticeble difference.

I want to thank you all for the love and support you gave me in your emails today it was a great boost and i am working hard every day here. Have a great week everybody and keep on making wise decisions

Love
Elder Hatch