April 16. 2012

Hello Everyone,
I've got some exciting news. I'm finally leaving my first area tomorrow. I got a call from my mission president on Friday night letting me know that I'm going to be "white washing" an area with a new companion. I don't know to where yet, but hopefully I will get to go somewhere interesting this time.
This week has been a decent week with regards to teaching. We haven't picked up any new investigators this week, but we have had some good lessons. We've increased our teaching of father led families as well which is pretty awesome. I'm excited that I'm leaving the area, but I'm sad that everything seems to be picking up and progressing more now that I'm about to leave. I'm going to miss the branch members a lot and the people we've been teaching.
We were able to spend almost all of Thursday doing a service project in Alexandra at a high school there. It was a lot of fun, and after we painted all day we got into a pretty intense game of basketball with some Afrikaners. We kicked their trash by the way. It lasted almost all day and was a nice change of pace from tracting.
Once it gets dark it's almost useless to tract or contact here because everyone is paranoid that someone is going to rob them. So once the sun goes down no one will answer their door or talk to you, so we end up going home early to plan or call people if we don't have appointments set. One day this week though when we went home we didn't really get anything done because some of the other elders brought over Risk, and it lasted a long time. You'll be happy to know that I dominated the board though. It was pretty awesome. I took a picture of the board, but I can't send it this week though because I'm emailing from some pretty sketchy computers, and I don't want my sd card to get a virus.
General Conference was amazing also. I loved almost all of the talks. I only fell asleep for one of them, which is pretty good for me. While all of the talks were awesome, we didn't feel like any of them really were geared toward us as missionaries. If I'm wrong let me know, but I didn't get a lot of help as a missionary from this Conference. Except maybe Christopherson's talk.
That's it for this week though. Thank you all for the extra letters and emails. I can tell that you were paying attention during the Sunday morning session. I love and miss you all.
Elder Balmforth