Email of Jan. 25, 2009

Dear Family,
So many exciting things! I'm excited for Edward, it sounds like exciting things are happening in his life. I'm also really excited for Colby. The Fijian missionaries were in the same zone as us at the MTC and we were all really good friends. I'm excited for him to meet the missionaries from Kiribati especially. A lot of exciting things have been happening here as well. One of the biggest things happened last Sunday. We had a change in the branch presidency. We will miss our old branch president, he was a really good president and is pretty much the only reason this branch even exists. But we are really excited to work with our new president. He is an American who doesn't speak Kreyol at all. But he has been our High Counsellor for a while and will be really good for the branch. He has been working on his Kreyol for the last six months since Elder Scott came and asked him to start learning. The work is doing pretty good in this area. We have a lot of investigators but not very many of them are willing to progress so we are going to be doing some really good finding this week to try and improve the quality of our teaching pool. We are working with some really good people right now. Our main investigators are a couple named Renel and Barbette. The missionaries have been teaching them for a while and they love the church but they haven't yet received a response yet about the Book of Mormon. This week we are going to focus on helping them recognize the Holy Ghost and try and commit them to accept a baptismal date. Also, Dad will find this interesting, Renel was really active with the Scouts in Haiti and we are getting him involved with the youth here. I think it will be very good for him. We have another investigator named Joel who we just found this week. He is a really nice guy and loves the church. We came to the church to ask about English class and we invited him to take a tour. We gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon and committed him to read and pray. We have our second lesson with him tonight and I am really excited. He also told us that he was the principal mayor a city in Haiti called Cite Soleil. He and his family were forced to leave when the current president's regime took power. It is a pretty amazing story. Those are some of our main investigators right now. This week is going to be really good. The branch is also having a baptism this weekend; Peter and Miara who I taught in the other area are going to be baptized. They are really excited and I'm excited for them. That is pretty much the run down on what's been happening here. I hope everything is going well at home. I can't wait to hear from you next week.
Love,
Elder Larson