First E-mail from Florida (Aug.4,2008)

Dear Family,
Greetings from the sunshine state! Let's get the important stuff over with quick. I am in the City of Palms: Ft. Myers, Florida. I'll also be spending some time in Lehigh Acres. My companion is Elder Hall. He is from Utah/California and has been out for about 10 months. He is a good missionary and we have been working good together so far. We are two of the four Haitian-Creole missionaries here in Ft. Myers. One of the others is Elder Welch from my MTC district so it's nice to see someone I know every once in a while. On Saturday our wonderful trainers left us all alone here in Ft. Myers while they went to Lehigh. It went surprisingly well. Whenever we would talk to a Haitian person we pretty much just did our best to understand them and did what we could to help them. Most of the people we talk to while tracting are actually English speakers. That caught me a little off guard. I expected to speak more Kreyol. Most of the times when we speak Kreyol are when we do member visits or at church. We've been seeing even less Haitians out recently because immigration has been increasing their efforts. In fact, we heard an interesting story about that yesterday during fast and testimony meeting:About the Branch:One of the members told a story, during Sacrament meeting, about how the immigration people broke into his house at 4 a.m. and he barely escaped. Haitian church is crazy! A lot of them are recent converts and so i guess it can be hard to keep them from going back to their old ways that they bring from different churches. My companion and I had a former investigator show up yesterday and she decided to bear her testimony. She had been talking for a while when the 1st counselor asked her to sit down, she turned back to the congregation and said something like: "If God wants me to say something, I can take five more minutes!" and the congregation said: "AMEN!" It was a little surprising but it didn't get too out of hand. All things considered, I guess it was actually a pretty normal sacrament meeting for the branch. Also, the English ward here was just dissolved and our branch president said that that was the best thing that could have happened to help us in becoming a ward. He thinks we could be one by January, and I'm pretty sure that would mean that we would be the first Haitian-Creole speaking ward outside of Haiti. But, we have a lot of work to do before that can happen.About the Area:Our area is one of four Haitian-Creole areas in the mission so I pretty much know where I'll be the next 2 years. We have the two areas here in Ft. Myers, there is a branch with two Elders down in Naples, and then a group and two Elders in Immokalee. Do you remember how my letter from the President said to not even ask about an extention? Well, I didn't have to ask, he said with the way transfers work for the Haitian missionaries, we can all expect to stay an extra two or three weeks.About the City:There are probably upwards of 200 churches here. It is the spring training home for both the Red Sox and Twins. It's known for hurricanes. There are a lot of Haitian and Spanish speaking people here. There are also some wierd looking ducks. That's about all I know so far. We share a car with the other Kreyol Elders here but we mostly use it to drive to Lehigh so we end up riding our bikes most places.About the Mission:President Colton and his wife are very nice people. He is probably the coolest Mission President in the world. I guess he was a White House fellow and has written a few books so he's a pretty intelligent guy. But more importantly, he just knows what it takes to make a mission successful. One thing that we do that's a little weird is that we do all of our first lessons in the chapel. We invite people to take a tour of the chapel and learn more about what we believe. Then we leave them with a phamplet on the Restoration and hope they don't stand us up. This way we don't teach as much because its harder for people to come to the church, but then we are teaching the ones who are actually interested. Also, its much easier to have the Spirit if you are at the church. You don't have to worry about other distractions and such. Also, we try to always give a baptismal commitment on the tour. That shocked me a lot at first but I'm settling into the idea and it makes sense.I think I pretty much covered everything I needed to say so if I didn't answer all of your questions you will just have to wait a week. I look forward to hearing from you next Monday. I'm sure I'll have plenty of stories to tell.
Love,
Elder Larson