Email March 23, 2009

Dear Family,
This past week was an exciting one. We are still in a mostly-finding mode right now. We're never not in a finding mode but it's been more finding than any thing else for a while. It looks like we might need to be doing even more in the coming weeks if our investigators don't start progressing. We have a lot of potential investigators but none of them are real willing to progress. But this week we found some newer places to tract. It is a huge apartment complex that we didn't think we would be able to find any Haitians at, but our first day we found two. Which wasn't too good, but better than I expected. Hopefully we'll be able to find more.But I know that even if we don't find too many, that when we are willing to go out and search for them we will be blessed with people to teach, even if they come in other ways. This week I also had the opportunity to go on my first exchange outside of Ft. Myers. I was in Immokalee from Wednesday to Friday. It was a really good experience. Immokalee is an awesome town. It reminds me a lot of Blanding. If you made Blanding about three times bigger, added a lot of plant life, and turned all of the people into Spanish and Haitian people you would have Immokalee. Immokalee has one branch that is combined Spanish and Kreyol. The whole Haitian group is made up of around 30 youth and a couple inactive adults. It makes things pretty interesting but everyone says that the youth are the best part of serving there. Yesterday we had branch conference. It went really good. The stake was all there and taught most of the classes. We got new young womens, young mens, primary and elders quorum presidencies. They are bringing in a lot of help from outside the branch which should be really good, especially for the youth, a lot of which don't really have good home lives of good role models to look up to. Also, yesterday our branch president told us he is going to ask our President Colton permission for us to start a basketball night with a few of our investigators and their friends. There is a bunch of kids who used to come every Wednesday and play but it got too big and too crazy since it was at the same time as mutual. So he wants to keep those kids coming to the church but not at the same time (mostly to keep them away from the young women). We are hoping that will go through. It would be a great for us to find people and it would be funner than tracting. It's something that we had already been thinking about so we were happy when he suggested it. Also, while we're one the topic of sports, today we are going to a Red Sox spring training game if it doesn't get rained out. I'll send you pictures. Well, it sounds like you had a fun time on your road-trip. But, I bet that you're glad to be back at home. I hope you had a little time to relax before getting back to work. Thanks so much for you e-mail. I always love to hear from you. I hope all is well at home. You are always in my prayers.
Love,
Elder Larson