April 18, 2016

Well, I haven't yet gotten your email, so I'll just print it out later.  In the meantime though, I'll fill you in on this last week and everything that has happened on our end.  You've got to stop waking up super early Monday morning to finish your email, and just get it sent off Sunday morning mom :).  

Well, this week was really interesting.  One thing I've heard from other missionaries who have already come home, is that you learn the most random things on your mission, things that you never thought would come up.  Well, after this week, I'm pretty confident in saying that I could become and IT guy tomorrow if I wanted to!  When we were writing our emails, and the internet went out 2 weeks ago, that started a long process of trying to get the internet fixed in our building, and that responsibility fell on our shoulders.  We got to talk to people in the offices in Moscow (the guy I was talking to said he'd pass on a привет to надя, денис and владимир).  Anyway, after several hours, we finally got our modom working, and our firewall up and running.  It took a lot of time, but it was kindof left for us to do.  

Other than that this week was kindof up and down.  It felt like one of those times where either I'm sick, or my companion is sick.  We managed to still get work done, but it was unfortunate because we called and called and called several people and just could not get an appointment.  We did meet a couple of really cool people, one of which speaks fluent English, lived in New Hampshire for a while, and saw the Meet the Mormons movie before talking with us and really wants to meet!  We've yet to set up a second meeting, but that was a miracle.  This week has been really cool in terms of goals.  I can't lie and say that I've liked goals during my mission, when it comes to the language, I just sit down, I start with whatever question I have in my mind at that moment, and inevitably it leads to other questions which lead to other questions, and then I realize that my hour of language study is done, and that I got several really cool answers.  Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about how to set better goals, and I finally came up with a system that's worked well this last week.  So I have a list of 8 goals that I want to focus on this month, and underneath I drew a calendar for every day of the month.  At the end of each day (or the next morning) I go through each goal and record whether I improved, did worse, or made no progress.  It's been really cool to see how progress has already been made as I make sure that it's a daily process.  I know that prayerfully setting goals helps us reach our potential, and I encourage everyone to find a way to set goals that works for them.  I know it will help you improve.

Lastly, I just want to give a shout out to Aaron Shavitz who's birthday was 2 days ago!  

I love you all!  Have a great week!  Feel free to write me whenever, and I'll try to get back whenever the next Monday is!

Elder Belnap