March 23

Hey everyone!! This week was awesome and we had a lot of cool success,
we have an awesome new investigator named 'O.' We were teaching
two teenagers and 'O' was there as one of their friends. As we
were teaching 'O' mentioned that he used to go to church all the
time! We were surprised to hear that and asked if we could come by
again, upon arrival a couple days later we discovered that his dad is
an extremely old member of the church, he was baptized over 25 years
ago! He told us that he would come to church the next day and we set a
baptismal date with 'O,' both of them were in church yesterday!
It was great and it seems with any luck his baptism will hopefully be
a couple weeks from now. We also had a couple of cool service
opportunities, my favorite was for our 80 year old investigator
'T,' we always offer to help her with things but she's always
very stubborn about being self sufficient. A couple of days ago we saw
her trimming her yard and garden and wouldn't take no for an answer,
she let us help her trim and clean everything and it definitely helped
us strengthen her trust in us. She told us that she's going to be in
the church this week 100% this next week, and invited us to her 81st
birthday party! Hahah she's a cool old lady and I was happy we were
able to help her out for once. In other news we also had a super
lengthy debate with a muslim guy while we were contacting, hahah I
really wanted to trade him a book of mormon for a dutch quran because
i think thatd be an awesome souvenir, an update on how that goes will
follow later. Anyways zone conference this week was awesome! Elder
Cornisch from the 70 gave us a really cool lesson! That guy was
pulling out scripture references from thin air he probably referenced
like 50 just during his lesson it was nuts! He let us ask questions
about things during lunch and he answered a bunch of cool ones people
had. He really isn't someone who looks impressive, but once he starts
talking and teaching its crazy how much he had to teach us! He would
also say funny things like "Buckle up your seatbelts!" when he got
ready to hit us with something interesting which i thought was
hilarious, hahahah he was great, and we learned a lot of cool things
about missionary work and how to make what we're doing more efficient!
There was once again a focus on members, and the best way to do
missionary work, which is to teach their investigators, not have the
members teach your investigators, which i thought was a very
interesting insight. Anyways it was an awesome and fun week and I'll
keep you all updated with our investigators and who's progressing next
week! Love and miss you guys!!
Elder Carpenter

 A family they did service for.

About the goats, Calvin said:  

"They have them staked to areas of grass everywhere around here
so i just go up and pet them they're actually super nice, they just
ignore you for the most part since they're always so busy eating."