First week in Fort Myers

One of Elder Talbot's last days in Lakeland
with Elder Young.

So my new area... it's all right. The zone is all Spanish and Haitian-aries. Elder DeHoyos is my district leader here and he is awesome! He's doing a great job. Fort Myers is a lot more tropical than Lakeland was. Elder Treseler, my companion, is pretty cool, uber obedient. He's a working machine, so we are exhausted by the end of the night. We get a long pretty well. He's a convert from San Francisco. The apartment is really nice except for the cockroach problem we have. Other than that I like the apartment. We get our apartment sprayed every week for the roaches but they are everywhere. We kill a few everyday. It's not way bad, they are pretty small and we just make sure our food is sealed up real good. We have a washer and dryer which I love! Although I'm back to a twin bed. I feel like I'm going to fall out.

My companion and I had 23 lessons and 115 contacts with 14 return appointments, which is way better than the mission expectations. The work is really good here. We have a lot of good investigators. Everyone is Hispanic or black here. It's crazy how few white people there are. I get to speak a lot more Spanish here. We have a ton of investigators so we get lots of lessons in. We are teaching a guy named Travis, who doesn't speak any Spanish so we have to translate in church for him. We gave him a baptismal date for the 20th and we think we can get his mom too. Then we are teaching Vijilio who was a Catholic priest for 6 years but decided to get married. He is really interested and so is his friend. We are going to try and commit them this week.

We visited an Islamic center by our chapel! We saw it and I really wanted to go in and see what it was like, so we did. We went right after Friday Prayers and talked to the priest. Everyone was SO nice there! I got to talk my little bit of Arabic and they gave us a Quran and some other books. We are going to go back for Friday services.

Church here is different. There aren't any English wards close by and we have a few members that don't speak Spanish, so we have to translate for them. I've never done it before so I was pretty bad at it. Translating is rough. You really do get a headache. Sometimes I am so focused on what the teacher is saying that I just start talking in Spanish until I realize it. Especially for testimony meeting where people are crying and speaking a million miles and hour. I'll definitely get a lot of practice in. I guess it will be good practice if I decide to do that for a career. I'm actually learning a little Creole here, enough to do a street contact. The members here are great. We have a few families that we visit a lot and have tons of fun with them.

Well, I love you all!