Week of Service

Dear Family and Friends,

Well it sounds like you guys had a fun week this week with erics and heathers birthday. Mom sent me a bunch of pictures and it looked like you guys had a lot of fun. Especailly jack brady and gabe playing in the stream. Anyways happy birthday heather today, i hope you have a good birthday! Well this week was really good for me. So we have been having trouble lately working with our ward. Our ward is really strong but no one has been helping out with the missionary work. I dont even know the last time we have recieved a refferal from anybody in the ward. So we decided that we would do a lot of service this week to try and change it. We did almost 10 hours of service this week, we cleaned the church and helped a family in our ward move. I felt like i was at home help brad and teri move again! But really it has been an awesome week,  like the scripture says when you are in the service of your fellow being you are only in the service of your God. We are hoping that the ward gets exctided about the missionary work and that they start helping us out. We also had a missionary fireside to get them pumped and ready to do some missionary work. Also, everything is going good with our investigators. Isabel went to church yesterday and after we taught her about the book of mormon. She read the introduction of the Book of Mormon and after she had a lot of questions. She has came a long way from where she was when we first found here and she is excited for her baptismal date. She will be getting baptized in July, about 2 weeks after the transfer ends, and i could very easily be transfered, so there is a good chance i wont get to see her be baptized. I want to see her get baptized but more important than anything is that she gets baptized and enters into the path that leads to eternal life. Also, we are teaching two other ladies that have been coming to church for the past couple weeks and are just searching for an answer, and i am pretty sure that they will get there answer and get baptized also. So yeah this area is really doing good right now and the Lord is definately working here. Anyways, everything is going good here, I hope everything is going good for you all back home, love ya all and have a good week!

Elder Wadman

What a Week!

Well first off its good to hear that everything is going good back home. Happy birthday, brooke, grandma, eric, and heather, and happy fathers day dad! I hope you guys all have good birthdays and that you had a good fathers day yesterday dad. It was cool to see all the pictures from all of the events this last week. Well, this week has been a pretty cool week for us. I have seen the Lords hand in our work this week. We put another date for baptism and almost put two more after that. First off, we have Rafeal and he is going to get baptized that first week of august he now is finishing 3 nephi and he is reading the book of mormon faster than me. He is a really cool and is progressing a lot. Also, a cool experience that happened this week was this, we started out on day and we had about 6 appointments right as we left the house. For some reason we decided to go and ask one of the young men from the ward to go with us to our appointments. So we walked way out of our dirrection to go to his house. When we got to his house he wasnt there, but his aunt was there and she invited us in and gave us water. We started talking to her and found out that she isnt a member and then we set an appointment with her. We went back on saturday and taught her and she is totally prepared to recieve the gospel right now in her life. She came to church yesterday and we found out that she has visited other wards before but had never shared with the missionaries. She was basically just waiting for us and we will be putting a date for baptism with her this week. So we were definately guided to her this week. Then another lady accepted a date for baptism yesterday, she has went to church a couple times and i can tell that it really is making changes in her life. Well these past couple weeks we have been teaching a lot and we have a lot of people that are progressing. I hope i get to stay here another transfer to be able to see these people all the way through the whole conversion process. After 5 months of knocking doors we are starting to see some results and the lord is pouring some blessings out on us right now, so it has been a good week. Anyways, the work is still coming forth down here, we also had a mssion conference this week and it was super cool. Our mission president had a us read a talk called the 4th missionary and then he talked a lot about the talk. The talk is really cool. One part that i reallly liked was that it talked about,  is everything that we can give god. There truely are only two things that we can give god that arent already his, our heart and our mind. Our time, money, and talents are all good stuff that we can give him, but we are only giving him back what he has givin us in the first place. but our mind and our heart are ours and if we give them to god then we truely are giving him everything. so that was a pretty cool conference. Anyways, everything here is good i hope all is going well for you all back home and that you have a good week this week. I love ya all

Elder Wadman

Dear family, and friends,

Well, I saw all the photos of Bear Lake and it looks like you guys had
a lot of fun up there! And the memorial pictures looked like it was
fun too. I hope you guys had a lot of fun. Well, it has been a good
week this week. I have found out that Peruvians speak a lot different
than Dominicans. The peruvian missionary that lives with us doesn´t
understand a lot of Dominican words and me and the Dominicans dont
understand a lot of the words that he uses, so i guess it is a little
different spanish out there in peru. Anyways, we have been teaching a
lot this week. We are teaching this guy named Rafeal and he reads a
lot! He has already read to halfway through Alma in only a couple
weeks, and he remembers everything. He is really intelligent and is
progressing a lot. The other day i asked him to explain how we have
have the book of mormon and he told me everything. he started with
joseph smith and the vision and then how mormon had a son named moroni
and he gave the plates to his son, and after his son wrote he put the
plates in the ground. And then how Joseph was shown by moroni where
the plates were. he also explained about the 3 and 8 witnesses. and
the whole story of the Book of Mormon. It was pretty cool because you
dont see that everyday here in the DR. So we are excited about that.
We also are teaching a lady named lily. She came to church last week
and she told us that she has prayed and has recieved an answer and
knows that the Book of Mormon and the church is true. We are really
excited for her, she wants to get baptized, but she needs to get
married first. so that is what we are focusing on is finding a way to
get her husband involved too. He seems like a really good guy, So i am
hoping he will start listening to us too and the whole family can come
unto Christ. We have the same situation with a lady named Maragarita
and she wants to be baptized but her husband doesn´t want to get
married, they have been living together for 19 and he still doesnt
want to get married. so we are trying to work with him and I hope his
heart will be softened and that they will get married so she can get
baptized. We are teaching a couple other people too and we will see
what happens with them. Anyways, everything here is great, I hope you
guys are enjoying the first part of the summer. Love ya all and have a
good week.

Elder Wadman

Dear Fam,

Well, it sounds like you guys are going to have a pretty fun time up there in bear lake. Nothing better than that! I hope you guys do a little extra boating for me this year, and eat a little extra food for me too haha anyways I hope you have or had a good time up there. Well first off, I am staying another transfer here in enrriquillo, after this transfer i will have 6 months here and I am staying here with elder garcia and they are taking the other two americans out of our house and i will be living with 3 dominicans now. I think the Lord is really trying to get my spanish better or something haha I really am glad though that i am staying another transfer me and elder garcia have finally started to find some people and we have some people coming to church and I thought that i might be leaving, so i am glad to be staying. So we have found this little family, with a mom and her daughter and we have been teaching them. The Daughter has read the pamphlets and on the back she has filled out all the questions. They live about thirty minutes away from the church walking and yesterday she woke up really early and got ready and we were walking with her to church at 715 in the morning, so she is pretty golden. We also are going to take over the investigators of the two missionaries that are getting transfered out of here, and so we have got quite a bunch of people that we will be teaching now, so it will be a good transfer. Also, yesterday we ate lunch at our bishops house and his father in law was there eating with us. Turns out that his father in law was the first bishop ever, in the DR! So it was pretty cool sittin next to him talking about that stuff, he has been a member for 30 years, one of the first converts here in the DR. Anyways, other than that life is still good just chugging away here in our house that we still haven´t moved out of but hopefully someday soon they will finally move us. But everything is good here I love you all and have a good week this week!

Elder Wadman

Oh and here are some photos, me and some kids from the street some kids from the ward, a couple from the temple, and a truck filled with pineapples that passes by our house and sells pineapples form about 50 cents! its awesome!