Dear Family,
I hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas. I'm kind of glad that it's over, because now we're back to work and no more boredom. It's kind of terrible that I'm saying that I was bored of sitting around for a few days. Kind of strange. Anyway, as you can probably tell from the subject of this entry, I forgot to tell you something last week when I emailed. We had transfers last week and I moved! I actually moved to one of the smallest towns in the mission: Třebíč. It's a quaint little town. You can walk from one end to the other in twenty minutes, and there are lots of hills. I've heard a joke that every way that you walk is up hill. Well, it's true. The center of town is down in a valley and then all the houses and everything else are up on the surrounding hills. It's actually turning into a big pain walking all of them every day. I've heard that the town is about thirty thousand people and I believe it. With such a small town, we get a lot of time to tract, so also in reaction to that, we know where peoples' addresses are so we meet them at their homes instead of at our building. The work here is quite different than in any other town that I've served in so far. That's not to say by any means that I don't like it. I actually love it, so far.
I have a new companion, and funny thing is, he's the companion that Elder Rhodes had before me. So, Elder Rhodes served with him, then I served with Elder Rhodes, and now I'm serving with Elder Ingalls. It's turning out really nice how things are going. For three transfers in a row I had people from Elder Page's group (Elders Page, Pearson [who were companions in the MTC] and Rhodes) and now I'm serving with Elder Rhodes' follow up trainer. I pointed out to Elder Ingalls that he's my oldest companion thus far, with the exception of my trainer. He's a fifth transfer missionary in the mission. My second oldest were my follow up trainers, and they were fourth transfer. This is really strange.
There's not a whole lot to talk about in Třebíč. We actually have a decent teaching pool. I'm really excited about that! It's been a while since I've had that. We have one baptismal date. She's a Mongolian lady. She's really nice, but it's seeming like right now that she's not really retaining information, so we'll have to find some way to get around that. I think that that will be solved with a solid testimony about why we're meeting with her. We'll see. Other than that, all our free time is spent walking up the hills to get to the panelaks so we can tract into people. My town is simple, and thus my life is simple now too. :)
I love this work. Many times missionaries joke around saying that they're going to get sent to Jihlava (which is the other half of our district) or Trebic as a punishment, but I actually really enjoy it and know that the Lord needs me here at this time. The branch is wonderful. They're organized and work just like a ward of 150 people, even though there's only about twenty of them that are active. We finally get to do only missionary work instead of babysitting the branch. It's wonderful.
I love you all and hope that you stay warm this winter,
Starší Monk
PS - the picture is of Elder Rhodes and me when they dropped me off at the train station to come to Třebíč.