October 25, 2010

Dear Family,
Well I had a great first week in Burton. Lots of things are different from Kidderminster, though the first and most obvious one is that I don't know the area very well. It's also organized very differently from Kidderminster. Kidderminster is almost like a big circle with the town center in the middle and everything else leading away from that, but Burton is almost like a couple small town centers with attaching residential areas and just more spread out. Kidderminster was very compact while Burton feels sort of stretched out.
The next big difference is that it feels like we don't really work that hard, which is kinda nice because it means it's a little more relaxed, but at the same time makes me wonder if I can work harder. Along with this though, Burton is a lot easier to have success in it seems. With Elder Mower we had like 3-4/12 weeks with our 10/10/10 goal reached, and even though Elder Duke and I walk like half the day (normally in Kidderminster we cycle and stop people as we bike) we still got it, although we did get the last 3 Books in like an hour tracting a street he and the previous Elder prayed about. I don't know, it's just a little unsettling for me to move from hard area where you work and sometimes get only 4 Books on the week to walking around and talking to like 30 people a day and still getting your 10s and having more investigators at church than I've ever had. To be fair in Kidderminster I think the highest we ever had was 1 at church at a time, but we still beat that here in Burton with 2.
Another massive change is that instead of having 2 Dinner Appointments a week with pretty much the same 2 families, we have a dinner appointment almost every night of the week, and we have to tell people no sometimes because we can't do a night. At least now I'm practicing eating all sorts of different foods not made by me, and I do feel like I'm getting a lot better about not being a picky eater. It is just a big change though, and it's weird because I'm used to having a dinner break to relax and think, not talk to families and stuff.
We have an American family here named the Manors and they're pretty cool, although the kids are a bit crazy. We had Mexican with them last night and that was just kind of crazy because, well, it's England where Mexican food is not the most common thing.
Elder Duke is pretty cool, he actually reminds me a lot of Alex which is fun but creepy at the same time sometimes. He's from Arkansas so he has the whole Southern attitude and upbringing which is different because he actually knows what it's like to grow up in the Bible belt. Last night though we went tracting for the first time (another big difference, I think Elder Mower and I tracted at least every other day for an hour or more) and he kinda had a salesmen vibe which is very plausible because he worked as a door-to-door salesmen before his mission and it really annoyed me. He also will sometimes talk over me, but that might be because his last companion was a greenie and he's used to having to do most of the talking. Hopefully I can work those out, I guess that's why we have companionship inventory, although it seems a little useless as the last step of weekly planning because usually I'm either tired enough of planning I just want it over with or weekly planning was so annoying for one reason or another and I don't want to express how I feel because I'll just want to lash out. This weeks weekly planning was good, but previous ones were not so easy.
Well I still feel sort of pessimistic and I don't want to be, maybe it's just a side-effect of working in an area with almost no success, or maybe I just have some Spiritual growth to do. Or maybe there's lots of good things and I just focus on the negative. I don't know.
I do hope everything's going great back home. Lauren looked really creepy with the black hair, don't let her dye it that way ever. It's getting very cold here as well, especially when it rains it just gets cold all the way into you. So, hurray for 5 months of cold on their way, and a Sun that goes down(eventually) at 4-5. Daylight Savings Time, whenever that starts, is really going to kill. It gets dark at around 6:30 now, so it'll be dusk at like 5 pretty soon.
I love you all and I hope you all have a great week!
Ryan