Dear Family,
February 3
This week we had zone conference and it was really great and there were a lot of things to learn. It mostly focused on improving teaching, which is a big focus for me right now. The next day we met with Fred, a referral, he is a Philippine and we had a good lesson with him. He promised that he would come to church the next week. He is Catholic and goes on his church on Sunday, has us teaching him on Wednesdays and he has the Jehovah’s Witnesses on Fridays. (He likes learning about religions.) We will keep meeting with him to see how he progresses. We also had exchanges and we met a lot of cool people. One person that we met was Mario, a mailman. He is ready for the gospel and is being prepared; he lives down in the valley so we hope the missionaries find him down there. He was telling us that the next big earthquake is coming because there are some signs happening like weird weather (80’s one day, rain and 60’s next, then 65 which dropped to 42 and 50 the next day), birds acting unusual (one day there were a lot of crows and then the next day nothing). He said that these signs were also present in the last bad earthquake in 1994 which he experienced; we’ll see if he is onto something.
We picked up two new investigators – the VanDeventer family and a couple named Cory and Karla. They are amazing and they seem so prepared for the gospel. So in all, we got four new investigators right now which is great. It’s nice to have people to teach.
We also went back to see Zaher this week (knife situation last week) but we had a member with us so we weren’t alone with him and the grandkids. His situation just keeps getting more confusing; I have no idea what to think so we’ll just see what happens.

February 10

This week wasn’t super busy, but we still had some good things happen. First we got to meet with Jessica, a less active since she was a teenager, and she has really wanted to read the Book of Mormon all the way through and in 2 weeks she has made good progress. She and her husband, a nonmember, even came to church, partly because we were singing in church. We sang ‘This is the Christ’ and it went really well. Then we went to the VanDeventer family with their home teachers and it went well. They want to get back into the church so badly, but a lot keeps happening in their life that holds them back sometimes.
We had more less active lessons this week, either with members or nonmembers in the family. One couple that we taught was Cory and Karla. Cory set a baptism date for March 15th, but he didn’t make it to church so we will have to push it back a bit. This was a little disappointing because he is so ready to be baptized; they have even been to the temple’s visitor center at least twice. He just needs to come to church.
Last fast Sunday our mission president asked all missionaries to include the California drought in their fast. This was a state-wide fast; the drought is much worse than expected. Later we did get some rain that brought some much needed moisture.

Love,
Kirstin Reese