Oh Boy!
The sent me to Lawrenceville, VA! This place is so awesome. its the ghetto country! haha. i dont even know how to explain it other than that the population is about 2000 people and the size of the branch is 150 but only 60-70 come each week. the branch is super cool and everyone is giving me grief for being a city boy because im from california. I dont tell them im from AZ, CA sounds better and even my mission pres said that! i told him that i moved to az a few months before i went into the mtc and he said that he'll tell everyone that im from Cali because that sounds cooler haha. President Perry is awesome. he is so laid back and is super easy to talk to! He interviewed me on Wednesday night and told me that there is something about me that he cant put his finger on and told me that i will be an excellent missionary. he has a lot of respect for catchers in baseball and when he found out that i was in the Fire dept, he ate that up. it was a super cool interview and from what i saw, i gave him a really good first impression. He is strictly to the white handbook and doesnt have any other rules. we can even have iPod touches here, he just has to disable the internet. NO BIGGY! send me one of those :) haha. Because i was a catcher, he asked about my knees and i told him that i had some problems with them in the past, so he preretty much told me that ill be in a car my whole mission. They have a little gym here in Lawrenceville that is $20 a month for the membership so i might do that to strengthen my knees hoping to eventually be in a biking area. we will see though. we have a little toyota corolla and get 1350 miles a month. our area covers 3 towns. Lawrenceville, Emporia, and South Hills. all about 20 miles from eachother. Saturdays we go to Emporia and have dinner with the King family every week. Super cool family. they have the oldest house in emporia, the light switches are buttons. very nice family. they fed us tater-tot casserole on saturday night! first time having that! haha. sister king knows how to sew really well so i gave her my pants to fix because the button hole on the inside started to seperate from the pants.
church yesterday was awesome. i got up and introduced myself. forgot to say where i was from! oh well, they will just have to have us over for dinner to find that out. we sent around the missionary meal calendar during church, so we have like 5 dinner apts. this month. the evans are feeding us on wednesday. bro evans is in the stake presidency and sis evans is just beyond nice. they have 11 kids!!!!!! he is a dentist and from what my companion says, he does missionary dental work for free!
My companion, Elder Buckley is from Bancroft, Idaho and is awesome! He will be training me for 12 weeks and we get along very well. He showed me around to some of the members houses on thursday when i got here and had a dinner apt. that night at the Tetto's. bro tetto is the 2nd counselor in the branch presidency and is in his mid 30's. sis tetto is nice, they both met on their misions serving in italy.
we have 3 recent converts that we are teaching the new member lessons to. one of them being marcus. he got baptized a few weeks ago and is awesome. he is so funny and has a wife that is investigating as well. we are going to try and get her to be baptized on the 25th of this month. we are starting the lessons with her this week.
Woody is a recent convert who got baptized last week. i met him at church yesterday and he is super cool. he is in his 40's and we are going to start teaching him the new member lessons this week. we confirmed him a member of the church yesterday before sacrament. that was pretty cool.
james is another recent convert. we set up an appt. over the phone last night with him for 7pm yesterday and when we got to the house, the lights were on but nobody came to the door. i guess he has been sick lately, so he might have just fallen asleep. after we knocked on his door, we went a couple doors down to a less-active members house, he came to the door and only showed his face and saw it was us. he said "aww man! not a good time bro, not a good time bro!!" so we set up an appt. with him tonight......elder buckley and i just looked at each other and laughed....
OH shoot!!! so the first time i met James was on my first day here, thursday. and we went up to the door and when we knocked, he heard a gunshot come from the back of another house!! we were like uhhhhh...... what do we do? so james came to the door and invited us in and when we were sitting on the couch teaching him, we heard another gunshot! it reminded me of back home. haha i was happy for a little bit. the ghetto is so fun here. marcus doesnt like to have friends though. idk why, but he said friends are stupid, so he calls us brothas from otha mothas. haha. it was so funny.
it rained here on friday and saturday, we went over to a less active members house to do service on her farm. it was cool, we just have to get her to church! idk what else to tell you...
so the apt has air conditioning. there is mold all over the bathroom. we are going to talk to the landlord about it. we got a new shower curtain for the shower, got a sunset with palm trees. had to bring the beach to lawrenceville! we are going to take some funny pics today to make as thank you cards to the members who feed us.
that is good that ian is pumpnig the iron and getting big! take pics to show him his progress. and kennady is going to play softball? thats super good too! sorry to hear that your shoulder is shot dad :(
this place is awesome though. the people here are very nice. idk what else to say other than that i am safe and having a blast! hard work though, and it is definitely hard sometimes when appointments fall through, along with the back up plans to those appointments. oh well. hopefully this week will be full of lessons and baptism dates! have a safe week and i love and miss you all!!!!
love, Elder Baldwin
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