Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Hey family,

Well we just completed a successful week of zone conferences, traveling and exchanges. Samuel was confirmed last Sunday and is doing well he is excited to get a doctrine and covenants, we are all out of English ones here so we have to order them up.

Last Sunday afternoon we left to Slovakia and spent the night with the zone leaders there in Zilina, they are some really good missionaries and are doing great things in slovakia, funny story with that though, we got to their apartment at like 9:20 at night and we were bringing up all of our stuff from the car in case it got broken into. I knocked on their door and this 23 year old Slovak girl answered the door with a big smile and i saw the zone leaders in the background busy doing something and they looked up and were like hey whats up, you could say I was very confused about what was going on with a woman in the apartment of our zone leaders at 9:20 at night but I quickly found out why, their washer machine had blown up and water was coming up and she was the land lady and was there with her husband who was fixing it, that brought a quick sigh of relief to me.

Zone conference went well there it was the first one but our training turned out really well, it was on teaching people on benches with the book of mormon. When the zone leaders there were doing their training Sister Slovackova was talking with me and Elder Mittanck and was like i have something important to teach you and started teaching us all the different names for womens shoes, President came over and he started naming them off too and told us that sister's had trained him well and that we should pay attention it may help us out in the future.

After conference we headed off to a town called Banska Bystrica to work with the missionaries there and it was crazy because I saw mountains for the first time since I was in Liberec and we were driving through all these canyons and it reminded me of driving in Colorado or Provo Canyon. The work went really well in Banska, we had only about an hour to work that night before it was time to go back to their apartment for the night, we headed out tracting and we got let in to an interesting teaching opportunity. It was an apartment of 5 college girls with 2 strong Catholics, 2 agnostics and an atheist but we were able to teach them all something which they really enjoyed and they went back to teach them two days afterward.

The weather here is finally getting better the sun is shining and its warm out, the elders there didnt have anybody to teach so we spent the whole day finding with them and headed off to brno to spend the night with the zone leaders there and have zone conference the next day, after conference we headed off to ceske budjovice to work for 24 hours with the elders there. Its a beautiful city there but has a reputation of being a "hard city" to serve in, 2 years ago there were probably 8 of those but now it is just down to them. All of the other reputations of hard cities have been broken. We were greatly blessed there and found a lot of cool people. There was one named Miroslav who I am particularly excited to see how it goes. I hadn't had such a powerful first lesson on a bench in a long time with him. After a long day there on Thursday we headed home exhausted, constantly driving and going on exchanges is exciting but very exhausting. We drove 1200 kilometers in 5 days; Elder Mittanck compares it to a life of a rockstar.

We had zone conference here in prague yesterday and its good to not have to worry about that for a little while now. At the end of zone conference the missionaries who will be going home at the end of the transfer give their final testimonies and it was pretty big reality shock because my group will be the next one up there giving their testimonies in 2 months. Time is short so I must work hard. I bought a new study journal on Monday to start over with taking notes. It sounds like everybody enjoyed sea world and six flags there in Texas. have a great week everybody.

Love,
Elder Hatch