Its Finally Happening!

Hey Family,

Whats up? It sounds like everyone is doing really well back at home. I am glad to hear that you had a good time up at henries, and that the rest of your 4th of July was great! Well this week was really good. With Elder Kaelin being the district leader, he has to go on trade offs to see how the other missionaries are doing, and this week we went on 2 of them. On tuesday, I served with Elder Bybee. He is from Idaho, in a small town by rexburg. He is a really funny kid and a good missionary, so we get along pretty well. We had a really good day, and we taught alot of our investigators. There is good news and there is bad news though. I will give you the bad news first. So we were hoping to baptize Brother Degannes on saturday, but he was out of town and kind of just left us in the dark. He is moving to england this week, so we have given him the address to the church in England so hopefully he will find the missionaries there and get baptized. It was really frustrating because we know that he is ready, he just hasnt had time. Well, the good news is... we are baptizing this week!!! So do you remember when I talked to you on mothers day, the story about the lady who breast fed her baby during the lesson on my first day in trinidad? Well her name is niesha, and recently she moved in with some members named the Moorali's. We started teaching her again, and she wants to be baptized. The only problem is she is not very smart and she cant read. It has been amazing to see the growth in her though. As we have been teaching her, she has been able to understand (for the most part) what we teach her. There is no doubt in my mind, that the lord has blessed her to be able to do this. This week we were able to find some other investigators that have alot of potential also. The Moorali's have been really good about doing their member missionary work and that is where success comes from. They referred us to a girl named Nefisa. She is really cool and we also taught her sisters Zelina and Semira. We are going to try to work with them alot this week also! One of the really cool things that happened this week was we were way behind on our goals. We had set our goals really high this week to try and push ourselves. In this mission, one of our Key Indicators is street contacting 10 people every day. Well this week we missed a couple of days so we were way behind. We also had a goal to recieve and contact 20 referrals. Well when saturday rolled around, we decided that we were going to do everything we could to meet our goals. This meant that we needed to get 30 contacts, and recieve 15 referalls, and contact 18. It seriously seemed like it would be impossible to do. Well we decided to go do some finding in an area named La Romaine, right of the bat, we found a new investigator, and we were talking to anyone that we could. We were slowely getting our contacts, but before we knew it, we had all 30 of them, and to make things even better, we  had recieved all of our referrals also, all before 3:00! It just goes to show that the lord can make anything possible, even when it may seem impossible!

Well you may be wondering what "its finally happening..." means right? Well, Im getting fat! I have been eating so horrible lately and it is starting to show. I hate it! I keep on saying to myself that I am not going to let it happen, but then I start eating crappy food all over again! But anyways.. This morning we woke up at 3:45 because we had a zone activity. We were going to a beach! But this time, it was one of the nicer beaches in trinidad. Mom, do you remember how I brought my swimming suit? Well I wore it today, but dont worry, I didnt go swimming! We got to the beach around 6:00am and had a little devotional. After that we played american football on the beach. It was awesome, but I must admit, that I have never wanted to go swimming so bad in my life! It was so much fun though, and I did get to sit in the water. I am really loving trinidad, and I cannot believe that my second transfer is almost over! Time goes by so fast! It was really cool to hear about that cancer walk, and I cant believe how much money mel and john were able to raise! It was great to hear from everybody, and thankyou for all of the emails! I loved it! Dad, dont give in to jason on the motorcycle, remember what he did with the scooter? Hahahah! jk, Well I love you all and keep on keeping my updated. The Church is true and I am so greatful for the opportunity that I have to be serving the lord.

Much Love,

Elder Gines