Gosh, I love the mission.

FAMILIA Thorpe! Great to hear from yall.  Sounds like things are a little less exciting now that football is over.  That's good to have  a tiny break from all the craziness.  AH man I really can't believe that SD trip is here again.  I hope you guys have a blast! The wind has picked up here a bit and I was thinking about how cold it is in SD with the wind blowing.  Hope its not like that this year! You guys gotta send me some good picks next week, Elder Smith and I really wanna see dead birds haha.  I'll send you a pic of the shirt that Elder Smith bought today its sweet. Plan for Thanksgiving is a multizone mtg this friday.  We will send some letters to home so be expecting that! Hopefully we will get some good food too.  Nah its not that cold right now, but they say it gets pretty cold for december.  I have officially started listening to christmas music.  I'm soaking it up this year!  Well, this week has started off better than the last one.  I got to give the Noche de Hogar(FHE) lesson last night with some investigators of the other elders, who are getting married this friday.  The whole branch is stoked for that! I talked about the influence of the spirit and how he talks with us.  It was pretty fun.  That family is super cool and are going to be the best converts ever. Today was tuesday and I got to make the long bus ride down to Ahuachapan with Elder A____, an elder that is here in Apaneca, just to get a Birth Certificate for this family that is getting married on friday. We did interchanges again today so I stayed with E. A____.  He is also from Peru and is a real cool kid.    We all ate dinner in the house of our investigator that just got his papers to get married so he can be baptized.  They don't have light in their house so we ate in the dark basically.  Who knows what I ate, but it was pretty good. I teach an English class every tuesday in the church so I got to do that today.  We normally only have like 3 or 4 people there but its pretty fun I like it.  Right now we are trying to find new investigators like crazy so we're using every idea we can think of! Hope we find some success from the English. Today was thursday.  The annual Fiestas of Apaneca are all this month so they have been setting up their carnival rides all this week.  Its like Art City Days but, all month.    The other big news this week is that a man and a woman that have been investigating the church for like 7 months are finally getting married and baptized.  They are investigators of the other elders but we visit it them a lot too.  They are getting married tomorrow and we have been planning and preparing everything for it.  Getting things ready for weddings are hard... so much stuff to do.  But we've got it all about ready to go, should be sweet.  Last week we had some trouble finding new people to teach during the week so we have improved on that quite a bit this week.  We are now finding people to teach, but the hard part is finding the ones that are willing to accept the Gospel.  Most here are pretty hard hearted and not open to change their religion.  But the Lord will provide some miracles for us, and we will find the way to get it done.  The wedding turned out great, but with a lot of wind.  Hadn't been windy all week long up until today.  But it all went well and they got married.  I am so tired from helping prepare everything tho.  Weddings are exhausting haha.  But it was worth all the work.  They are going to be 2 amazing members of the church and they have plans to go to the temple in a year to be sealed.  They are going to be baptized here in about a week.  They are investigators of the other Elders, but they are very close to us too.  We went to figure out what's up with I___'s papers for his divorce and we have to wait until Monday to get them.  But supposedly they are all ready.  They should be getting married and baptized the first of December.  But we will see how it all works out. Sunday was good, we had stake conference.  That's the 3rd stake conference I have had in the same year haha.  Later in the day we went on divisions with two members, my comp stayed in our area and I went down to the Sister's area to visit some of their investigators. It was cool, we talked to a guy who was close to having a baptismal date so on the walk to his house we were trying to figure out what we could do and teach to put the date.  They had planned to teach tithing and fasting so we went with that.  We got to the house and started by asking him how church went.  He said he really felt the spirit and knew that it was something good.  We then asked him to be baptized on the 30th and he said that no, he wanted to do it sooner.  Haha so he will be baptized this next sunday, the 23rd.   Well I hope you all have a great and fun week this week.  Dad, My testimony has grown soo much since last november.  I still don't think I understand the Atonement completely, and I don't think I ever will in this life.  But I understand it much more and the power it has for anyone who is willing to use it.  I don't know where I would be today without my mission and the things I have learned so far.  Gosh, I love the mission.  Love you all! Be safe this week!  Elder Thorpe

Here are some pics of the wedding.  We had it in the back part of the church.    

I was the DJ.  ;) No, just kidding.

This is the picture of the sweet shirt Elder Smith bought.  The other big guy is Elder Hicken, he was in the MTC with me.