Transfer

I meant to send a letter the first day of the new transfer, but by the time I remembered a couple days later, I thought I may as well wait until today to send the news. I'm in Valencia now, in the Seco Canyon ward, serving with Elder Davidson from Missouri who has about 6 months left to go on his mission. He's also the district leader, so this transfer will be interesting... P-Days and emailing will vary due to that. Not everyone has cars, so we have to carpool people around.

In this new area, we have 5 baptism dates set for this Saturday. It's a family, obviously, but nonetheless, that's awesome! I don't really get to count them as "my" baptisms, since they've been set since before I was transferred. The work is better in this area. A lot more people home. Hope good things come from it.

The first Thursday after the transfer we had an exchange. President Hall has a training with all the DL's right after transfers, so all the DL's companions get together and do an exchange. Each zone this transfer got a new district, putting us at 3 districts in this zone. With the influx of missionaries, especially sisters which is why many areas were changed to sister areas, we needed more as the districts were getting too big. Since we have an odd number of districts here, we combined all three for the exchange, so I was in my first tripanionship of my mission. That was fun, covering a whole zone. We went to Cafe Rio for lunch, and a member payed for us. May have happened anyways as the owner is Mormon. I heard he used to be a Mission President somewhere.

Yeah, we definitely got a lot of rain in the past week! The worst it got was something like a mid-winter rain back home. Nice and wet! We definitely didn't stay dry, though. We were out knocking in it, and I really got to test the trench coat (which President Hall loved, by the way). It held up pretty darn well for not waterproofing it. It took quite a while for it to start getting to my clothes beneath. Luckily we have a good size washer and dryer to get our clothes looking good again.

I hope everything with Grandma goes well. It'll be a new beast of a challenge when she goes home, but with faith she and everyone around her will be alright as she gets used to life back home.

Hope things continue to go awesome back home!

Elder Dallin DeFord