April 7th, 2014

Dear Mom and family, 

Sounds like everyone is having a great time in Cali! The week was good again. This Thursday I went to my first Leadership council meeting as a Zone leader! We are super excited in the mission and we learned a ton! Right now the mission is focusing not as much on baptizing people as "rescuing" the inactive members. Elder Rocha and I have been rescuing a lot of people; we rescued 8 people in the month of March. As a zone leader I am trying to learn to be more organized. We have so much stuff to organize and plan as zone leaders so I have been trying to get used to writing everything down in the agenda. A big part of what we learned in the leadership council is that every missionary needs to be more organized and use the area books. In the mission about 99 percent of missionaries don`t use the area book, but now that we are trying to rescue people (which requires teaching people all the mission lessons, an interview with the bishop, and 2 attendences) it is a lot more important to keep a great record of all the people we are visiting and what we have taught them. The good thing is that we are more organized. The bad thing is that I have not had time to write in my journal for quite a while now! 

The other thing Pres. Prince talked about in the leadership council is that all the Latinos need to learn English! There are very few Latinos in the mission that like studying English, But now they are requiring everybody in the mission to do language study at least 5 days a week. The church is now putting a big emphasis that all non-English speakers learn English. Sister Prince told us that they are even starting to make stake Presidents in Latin America learn English. 

The general conference was of course great! I got to watch it in English this time, so I was sure grateful for that!  We all loved Elder Holland`s talk at the beginning and I remember bits and pieces of other talks too. It was funny because we made a little bracket challenge of the general conference talks! You know, like they do with march madness! We decided in the end that Elder Holland won the tournament, but there were definitely some great talks. 

Thanks so much for all the pictures! I will try to send some more pictures here. The baptisms of Eyesmit and Alejandro are the end of this week, so we are super excited for that! Keep on praying that everything will go through with these baptisms. We have 4 other baptisms planned for this month so it should be a great month. Our zone is doing alright, but there are some area that are struggling quite a bit too. I will keep everyone posted on the baptisms and things coming up. Thanks for all the prayers and support! I love you all! 

-Elder Armstrong