"This Area has Some REALLY Good People Living Here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Parts of the email we received February 11, 2013.

HEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It sounds like you all doing pretty good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Everything here is pretty good. That lady we´re trying to get married, it turns out we have to completely start all over with the marrige process...And here in Panama that means another 2-6ish weeks...So we´re praying and hoping that everything goes smoothly and we´ll be able to get her married and baptized fairly quickly. Also we found a non-active family the other day that has a son who is 16 and isn´t baptized and they live right next to the church so we´re going to start working with him too. And we´re working with this one family who will be SUPER good members if we could get them baptized!!!!!!!!!!  So we´re working hard!!!!!!!!!!! This week we were able to get a lot more work done until friday. Friday until tomorrow is carnival here in Panama. And we´ve been trying to work as much as we can but it´s SUPER difficult!!!!!!!! We haven´t been able to do any contacting because everyone is drunk and the people that aren´t drunk are out of town. Also people are all over the streets spraying people with water (that´s a tradition) so as you can probably guess, 2 mormon missionaries who also happen to both be gringos, we´re pretty big targets :) so we´ve had to be creative when we´re walking down the street. And we´ve only really been able to visit menos-activos which has been good because this ward has a RIDICULOUS amount of menos-activos!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Seriously we just found out that our ward has 1000 members but only about 60 attend every week. So yeah it´s been pretty nuts!!!!!!!!!! But we´ve been working pretty good :)

Yeah that family home evening with the ward was REALLY COOL!!!!!!!!!! This area has some REALLY good people living here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And yeah they were laughing SO HARD when I was sitting backwards on the horse!!!!!!!!!!! Ha ha they now think that gringos don´t know how to ride horses :)

Anyways, it sounds like you all are doing AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks SO MUCH for all your love, support, and prayers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE AND MISS YOU ALL SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!