The thing that will give you success is your Attitude!

HEY!!!

You all sound so great! Love hearing from my awesome family each week! Happy to hear that the football team beat Bountiful, hope they keep playing strong.  Hope you all had a great Halloween! Here, we didn't do anything... in fact, I kinda forgot it was Halloween.  How boring am I? But it was cool to see the pictures of the cookies and the pumpkins! The weather in Apaneca has made me feel right at home at this time of year, I'm loving the cold! Thanks for sending that package mom. So excited for you all to head to South Dakota.  I hope i'ts not too cold and there are lots of birds.  Hey Savannah, thank you so much for the email! I bet the boys are huge now, they look like it in the pictures! I loved the story about Hunter.  Love you guys!!

Man I already feel like this week is flying and its only tuesday.  We had a short Pday yesterday because we are headed to the temple this thursday.  I am so excited for that trip! Its been too long since I've gone.  We just push along here in Apaneca. There hasn't been much success here for a while so we are really trying to change that.  We are trying to put a new vision here in the area and the branch so we can have more success.  Its not easy work haha but I think it will work and I know we can do it.  We are teaching a few people in this far part of the area, called Palo Verde.  Missionaries have never gone there before, supposedly, so we are trying to talk to everyone there.  We have found a few that are interested.  Its a 40 min walk to get there, but we are able to take a little bus there.  However, we have to walk back.  It will be all worth it when we baptize that whole area.

SO it is now friday, its been crazy this week.  We had to take the bus ride down to Ahuachapan Wednesday night because we had to sleep in the Zone Leaders house to be able to wake up and get on our way to the temple by 530am the next morning.  That was pretty fun.  The temple trip was awesome! Gosh I sure love that place. Mom I was thinking of you the whole time! Did you go on Thursday too? I hope so! We got stuck in a crazy rain storm later that day, I'll send some pictures to show you.  The streets literally were rivers.  I gave Elder Onofre my poncho to use cuz he didnt have anything, and I had my scriptures and stuff in plastic bags so they didnt get wet.  Haha it was crazy.  We found this lady this week named M.J.  She is way cool and way nice.  Her mom and her younger brother were baptized about 2 years ago but she wasn't, and now her brother is in the mission so she has a lot of influence from him.  Its like L from Atiquizaya, but a woman.  She has 3 kids and 2 are baptized, but inactive.  She is the perfect investigator and says that she just doesn't know which church to join because there are so many.  We taught her about the Restoration and she said she would pray about it, so were hoping things go good for her! I also found out this week that C____, the guy I was teaching in Atiquizaya got baptized on Sunday! I was so excited to hear that, he was so prepared and ready for the gospel.  Wish I could have been there! (and elder azabache is awesome! he is from Peru, he isn{t my comp but we work in the same area). Haha! That was from Elder Azabache, practicing his english.

SO saturday and Sunday have been some crazy days here in Apaneca.  They had some party going on saturday that had music blasting until 3am.  But I still slept like a rock.  It has also been very windy lately, and has brought the cold.  I never thought I would feel the cold on my mission, but here it is.  The wind is so crazy here, and they say it just gets worse and colder until February. I'm excited! We realized today that our investigators aren't progressing as how we would like them to.  We are trying hard to find new people to teach, but its been kinda hard.  Not many people want to listen to you here.  But I know that there are people that are ready to accept this gospel here and we are going to find them! I learned, again, this week that the thing that really matters and that will give you success is your attitude.  Have a positive attitude and things just work out.  So that's what we are going to work on this week.

I love you all so much! I'll talk more next week!

Elder Thorpe