Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Dear family,

Well the most hectic week of the year came and went successfully here. We had 9 new missionaries scheduled to come in this week but we weren't sure if they would be able to make it and we had 13 missionaries going home and we were scared their flights would get cancled and they would have to stay another week here before they could get home but luckily everything worked out well and we got the new ones and sent the old ones off safely. My new companion is Elder Doxey he is from california and is a great missionary he came in on tuesday, on thursday we sent elder mittanck off to ceske budejovice to train a new missionary, I am going to miss him he is a great missionary but he will do great things there. The best part of the week was hearing the departing missionaries testimonies, this group of missionaries that went home was an amazing group and it makes me nervous because they are the last group before my group.

Yesterday we went down to brno for leadership conference which turned out well and we have some good focuses going in the mission. Looking out over the leaders it surprised me by how young everybody is all of a sudden but the mission is in good hands we have a lot of good young missionaries. Right now I am probably more focused than I have ever been on my mission i want to finish strong and the lord has been blessing us. We got two more baptismal dates this week max and samuel so that is 5 people we are preparing for baptism on may 15. Pray for pani zemankova to have a good experience at church tomorrow she didnt have the greatest experience at relief society and she was disappointed she thought it would be better than that. Kenneth is doing well he found out that he is getting accepted for a visa to america and he is going to be working on long island for 4 months leaving in july to go there but he is very excited because that means he will still be in america during October so he wants to fly over to utah and go to general conference live and it was great to see him so excited about his baptism and general conference. We were talking with him and he said he was talking with his mother who lives in Virginia and that she started investigating the church as well there and really enjoys it. Samuel is an executive for Hewlett Packard here in prague but is a very humble man and he loved the plan of salvation and the restoration video.

We took the new missionaries on their walk around prague and it was great to see their reactions, none of them had ever been in europe before and they were all astonished by the beauty of the city some times we as missionaries take it for granted that we are living in the most beautiful city in the world but i am trying to appreciate it as much as possible. Like the other day i was contacting and i look up and there right in front of me is the dancing building which is this famous architectual building. prague is definetly starting to grow on me as my favorite city here in the czech republic.

I am also starting to get my business czech down, i had to renegotiate a insurance policy on the phone yesterday when i was in brno it definetly stretched me but i saved the church over 2000 krowns and a lot of money in future insurance policies. Businesses here are funny, they still have such a communist approach to doing business where they don't care about their customers and it doesnt matter to them if you leave, I tried some capitalism on them where I showed them how much money we are giving them on an annual basis and how we will continue being customers for a long time but that they needed to allow us to cancel policies if missionaries end up not coming or pushing them back if they are visa delayed which they hadnt been allowing us to do and if they didn't we would take our business elsewhere and it worked. it was funny to see the look of shock on the guys face and he was like uh uh you do have a point ill talk with me boss and they decided to change.

I also learned how to get a bid on a new car from a dealership . oh the things you learn while serving in the office, my favorite part about serving in the office is the opportunity it gives me to serve other missionaries and help them out and we still get to do quite a bit of missionary work which is a great blessing.

I love you all and I love the opportunity I have to serve the Lord now, it is pretty easy when you are in the most beautiful city in the world with people as great as the czech people. have a great week and have a great anniversary mom and dad next friday.

love
Elder Hatch