Life as a Trainer

Greetings to all,

Thanks for all the great emails. Mom, the pictures didn't show up so I needed to click on the attachments but only two showed up-the slide show thing was weird, lots of random cartoony pictures and then one of Mike and Sabrina at the water park (shrug) but then again I am in a different internet cafe than normal today and am surrounded with little kids playing computer games so maybe it will work better in our regular place.

Well like you saw from our picture, zone conference was on Monday. It was a really great conference and I am renewed to the work as always. In my interview with President he said that I prolly won't be in Tagonrog much longer- either Rostov or Krasnodar which would be interesting since I've already been there, but we'll see-I don't especially want to leave.

Some other interesting news that I received is that Estonia is tired of doing all of our paper work etc-understandable, all missionaries in Russia are going there every three months, so now next trip looks like it will be Prague (sp?) and it will be flying all the way-woohoo! (ahem...by the way...which country is that? Chek?) The train was fun but after the first two times it kinda lost its luster. Apparently Moscow and St. Petersburg are going to Madrid for their visa trip and in a few months we will switch and we will get to go to Madrid so we can go to the temple there-isn't that amazing?!!! I was sooo excited when I heard that-it feels like sooo long ago when I was in the temple. So apparently I'm making up for the lack of world traveling pretty quickly.

Well the work has been pretty slow lately. I've decided that the only thing worse than little to no success on the mission is little to no success when you are the senior companion and you are trying to help your comp have a desire to serve their own mission someday and you feel 100% responsible. You begin to wonder if you are doing something wrong (of course no one is perfect) and so then your weaknesses and inadequacies jump out at you and the guilt/frustration grows. Needless to say I was a little down the past little while but after talking with President at Zone Conference on Monday I feel a lot better and am returning to my positive-I don't care, I'm gonna do my best, attitude.

In fact when we were walking home from the train station on Monday I was really tired and in the middle of telling a story to my comp I saw a girl coming our way. Nothing special but as always I felt like I needed to talk to her so we stopped her and explained who we were and why we were here. She was interested and when we tried to get her number to call her sometime she said, "Let's meet right now"....k....never happens. So we found a somewhat secluded park area with benches and sat, got to know each other a little bit and then taught her a first lesson and gave her a book of Mormon. She is a music student here (piano) and really sweet and open. I can't describe how greatful and happy I was that I decided to talk to her and was so grateful for a loving Heavenly Father who knows how to motivate me to keep on working when its hard and you see no results-it seems that He always knows exactly when I reach the edge of my breaking point and then picks me up again and helps me to keep going. And yesterday we found some potential investigators so we'll see if any of them pan out.

Things are looking up and today we will watch the best two years with our district as our pday activity. I'm grateful for your love and support and mom, let them know that I got the letters from dearelder-(not sure how many 2-3?) something like that so no worries. I just realized I forgot to look if I had mail at conference but I will be in Rostov next Wednesday to switch up companions.

I think this is a good experience for me because....well, now if I ever train a real greenie it will seem easier because at least they will know the rules and the lessons-sort of so it will be that much easier to help them adjust to missionary work.

I love you all,

Cectpa Richards