I wanted to throw my companion in the air!

Dearest Mother of mine,

Glad to hear all is well. I can imagine dad would love to hire Eden. Haha. I´m glad the package was able to arrive well. I was starting to worry about that, especially with my beautiful coat. Haha. Yeah, they gave us Spanish scriptures when we got to the MTC, so I have my own pair, all beautiful and highlighted. Haha. (Well, kinda, since I have to transfer all my highlighted scriptures from my english ones.) Please say hi to grandma for me and tell her I love her too.

Sweet mercy, alot of people here suffer from alcohol addiction. As I mentioned in my last email, that´s like the main thing we deal with in this area. It´s really depressing, however, on the flip side, to see how much the Atonement can change someone really is a beautiful thing to see. Just shows you the fruits of this gospel, such as with an investigator we have named Leo. We checked by his house on Tuesday just to see if maybe he was home, (since he went to work in another town over the weekend and he´s the one we thought was gone for good) and when I saw him through his window, I wanted to throw my companion in the air. We were having a pretty tough day, and seeing him home
just made my day because he´s reading the BOM, praying, he´s been 3 weeks sober (which is the duration we´ve known him and have been visiting him), and I just know he´s going to get baptized. (Him and his wife.)

So, despite all my ranting about my difficulties, there are some really good moments here. It´s just really hard, this week especially. We had a lot of apointments fall through and had to deal with this incident with this guy who´s been attending church in Merida but is in our area. It´s kinda complicated to explain, but in a nutshell, he´s actually in our authority as far as teaching is
concerned and the branch president wanted him to attend here before he got baptized and his baptism got postponed because of that and my companion´s had to deal with all this and it´s stressed him out really bad, especially because the guy got discouraged by all this and is taking a break from church to evaluate things. We´re just praying he´ll have a change of heart and that it´ll be alright. It´s just been
a huge cluster, but we had a really good zone conference today, so I´m excited to apply what we learned from President and Sister Garcia this week. The work is more difficult than I imagined, but there´s no doubt in my mind that the church is true. Hopefully this week will be better. Love you tons and I pray all continues to be well.

Love, Manuel

PS The Albrechts really moving to South Carolina? Btw, can you believe that last Monday marked two months since I started my mission? Haha.

(Also, the picture of me with the elders was at our zone conference. These were the elders who served in my area before me and it was fun to bond over the area together.)