Man, what a fun week!!

Hey family! Como estan?

Question/answer junk.. I hope I get the package.. I'm not sure how important the suite number is, but I guess we will see! Thanks for sending it though! Yeah, I talked to the Frie's and to the Gardner's, so that was cool to have a little connection with home. Haha, I am really not 201 pounds.. I'm really like 188. I had my bag and my suit on in that pic, hahaha. I wish I was 201! Yeah, we get fed pretty often, which is good, and some of the pictures I'll send are from a less active's house named Juan, who feeds us a lot and also cuts our hair. He is wayyyyy cool! I'm soooo stoked for General Conference! What a great opportunity! That's cool to hear about coach Gilliam being coach! Good to hear! The languages in this mission are Mandarin, Spanish, English and Portuguese, I think... But that's all I know of. Our zone of Spanish speakers is like 15 Spanish speakers and fifteen English speakers, but I have no clue how many there are in the mission. Yes, finally got my own iPad and am treating it good! The standard of excellence is 21 lessons a week, so we try our best to hit that every week! Anyway, that's enough of that.

Man, what a fun week!! So first off, we had this new missionary meeting up in Scarsdale with all the new missionaries and their trainers that came! To be honest, I thought it was going to be pretty boring, but man was I wrong! The spirit was so strong there and just to hear the testimonies of all these new, amazing, excited missionaries was so much fun! I don't remember too much that was said at this conference, but I do remember how strongly I felt my savior's love and how good that made me feel. The main jist of the meeting was being loyal to the Savior. He is number one on our list and should be constantly and consistently. I want you to think to yourself what being loyal to the Savior means to you. Really think about it for a second. Being loyal to the Savior to me means always remembering Him, always keeping His and our Father's will in our minds and in our hearts. What we do as members of this church is hard. I've seen the difficulties people have of giving up worldly things to come unto to Christ and it is hard. But, as we set our hearts on the higher goal of being loyal to our Savior then things like that don't seem as big, trials seem to shrink a little bit and life just is better. I don't know about you guys, but I feel like the Savior is my best friend, some one who is always there for me and picks me up when I am down. A best friend who did something no other best friend would do and for that I am eternally grateful. He is our friend and our brother but He also is our Savior. Always remember Him. That's kind of what being loyal to the Savior means to me. He is so great, I love Him with all my heart! 

Something really cool happened the other day while we where tracting. So, we have this long road of just project buildings that are in our area and we had this one that we had been doing for the last couple of days that we weren't quiet finished with, so we were going to go finish it out one night. Anyway, as we were heading over there after dinner Elder Hinckley felt an impression that we should go to this other apartment building. We starting off and a lot of people were slamming doors in our faces or not even opening the doors and so we felt like it was kind of a bust. But we knocked on this one door and this huge black guy answered and sees us and about passes out! It was weird at first, but he began to explain how right before we knocked on the door he was talking to a friend on Facebook about how he needs to start coming back to church. (He was baptized when he was like 17) After he got done talking to this friend he explained how he prayed for the first time in forever for some sort of guidance. Right when his prayer finished we knocked on his door. He told us how he was really active in the church and was going to serve a mission himself, but he had some bad peer pressure and fell away. He was so excited that we knocked on his door and talked with him. He kept on saying over and over again about how we probably just changed his life. What a cool experience that was for me. He is an English speaker so we won't to get to teach him more after our lesson tonight, but this experience was just a testimony builder to me that the Spirit really does guide this work. 

I'm not sure if I have talked to you guys about Lili, but she is our investigator that is getting baptized this month! She is so funny and makes the best food!! The member and less actives feed us every time we go over and normally it is pretty good, but I hate Mongoo, and they seem to like to give that to me a lot, haha!

Last night I had the opportunity to take over the area...basically what that means is that another new Elder splits with me in my area and we take over the area for the day. Seriously the best day of my mission so far! It was soooo amazing! Hard, but the best. I split with Elder Nielsen, who has been out one more cycle than me, but our Spanish is about the same. He is an awesome Elder and taught me a ton of things! We had a record breaking day in the district with 10 lessons that day! We were non-stop; it was so fun! We stopped by Rigoberto's, who hasn't been answering his door lately and we can't call him because he doesn't have a phone, so we didn't think he was going to answer. But he did and I guess he broke his back or something, so he had been at the hospital for the last week which was really sad, but we taught him the gospel of Jesus Christ and it was the best lesson I have been in since I have been here. The Spirit was incredible and he is going to be baptized on the 24! I'm am so stoked. I gained a strong testimony of fasting and the blessings it brings yesterday. We were both pretty nervous about speaking Spanish by ourselves, so we decided we would fast and man did we get the gift of tongues. Fasting is so real!! 

We have spent most our day today at the Natural History Museum so I have been trying to write this in between events, so sorry about that. The museum is way cool, it just seems like we have been here for days! This lady that checked us in was a member so she got us in all the special movies for free! 

Anyways much love to you all!, 

Elder brown 

A couple of pictures from the "New Missionary meeting last week