7-26-10 Good progress

Family,

SO. We have been having a little difficulty getting people to progress this transfer. I feel like we made some good progress this week. We were at the Alarcon's house this Wednesday, a part member family where the wife is not a member. We have been trying to get ahold of them for weeks, but have not been able to have a good sit-down lesson. She has a good testimony of the restoration and the plan of salvation, we are just trying to get her to finally decide to make the decision to be baptised. Elder St.Clair used some inspired questions and it was great. He asked if she had prayed like Joseph Smith did. She said yes, so he asked what she found out. She said she felt like it was finally the time to be baptized. We committed her to pray about a date, and she said she would. It was cool hearing from her that she wanted to finally be baptized. We also invited them to come to church, which they have not done in about two months. They said they would try, but usually when Hispanics say that it actually means no. They didn't come. We were disappointed.

We have also been meeting with Gabriela. I wrote about how we found her last week. She is such a nice person, and it is a shame that she is having problems with her husband. We met with her Wednesday and talked about the book of Mormon and read a little bit of it. She said she would come to church, and she seemed like she really would. We went back Friday, and she had not had a chance to read the Book of Mormon, but she said she wanted to and was going to try after we left. We shared with her the message of the restoration. We asked her again about oming to church, but she didn't seem to sure about it this time. She ended up not coming. Hopefully next week.

We knocked the door of a Cuban guy on Friday. If you don't know, Cubans talk funny and don't say the ends of their words. It makes them really hard to understand. He said we could come back the next day, which we did. He had a friend over there, whe was watching TV. For about two minutes, he did not say anything. But once the guy we were there to see introduced him, he wouldn't stop talking. The friend was about 50, and went off about the History of Cuba, and religions there. We couldn't really talk much. But after a while he went off about his own religious beliefs. He said he believed in brujeria, which in Spanish means witchcraft. I was pretty wierded out, and didn't know what to do. My companion didn't know what it meant, and assumed it was some Cuban religion. He proceeded to tell us how they weren't how everyone here thought they were, and that they didn't hurt people or anything. We made an excuse to leave the first chance we got, and left a restoration pamphlet with the guy we had originally gone to see. He didn't seem too interested after all. Interesting experience, though.

I am out of time, but hope you all enjoy my letter. I just bought a new memory card, and transfered all my pictures to it. I will send my old card home so you can all look at all my mission pictures so far. There are also some videos on there. Hopefully you enjoy it all. Love you all!

-Elder Burnham