The Language is coming along

Letter from Sept. 28th:

Another week come and gone already. We were in Turku Wednesday night to Friday afternoon for Zone Conference. It was pretty sweet. Turku is quite a bit bigger than Kuopio and we were with the whole North Zone which was pretty sweet. There were about 20-25ish missionaries so it was cool. I got to see the Elders Ranzenberger, Empey, and Schoof. They're doing well as far is I could tell. Elder Ranzenberger is over is Vaasa, just across the water from Sweden, so everyone there speaks Swedish. He said he hasn't taught a single lesson in Finnish, only English. We had some cool meetings at conference and then we had a finding activity for a couple of hours. We were all assigned areas to go around Turku to do street contacting. The people there are totally different than in Kuopio. It was crazy. The craziest part is that I understood MUCH better what they were saying in Turku. In Kuopio I can get a vague idea of what's going on, with very few specifics. In Turku it was the total opposite. It was crazy and cool at the same time. Of course I didn't understand everything/everyone but overall my level of understanding was WAY more. They just speak differently. It's interesting. I think I mentioned it before but in Kuopio a lot of people speak ''Savo'' which is the accent spoken in the east. It's hard.

Letter from Oct. 5

We are also now part of the Oulu District, which is sweet because it's the farthest north district in the country. So for District Meeting in a couple weeks we get to travel up there to Oulu or maybe to Rovaniemi (where Santa lives). We're excited for that.

Conference was pretty sweet. We even managed to bring one of our investigators (who happens to be blind) to a session. She liked it so that was good. I'm already excited for the next Conference sessions.

Finnish is definitely getting better. We were in Jyväskylä on Friday for companion exchanges so that was really cool. Once again, I understood people WAY better there but it is coming along here as well. Thanks for the prayers, without them missionary work would not happen here.