Elder Spencer Romney : april 23, 2015 letter

Dear Family:

It's been a crazy week with all of the changes this past little while! I went from a suburb speaking Spanish to the middle of nowhere speaking English! It was pretty hard at first teaching and speaking in English because I would say my words backwards and stuff. But I got the hang of it after about the first week or so. It was weird because I had to get used to a language and culture that I was already used to it the past! But it was a pretty big culture shock going from my old area to my new one, but I love it here. One of the biggest differences I've seen is the dinners, obviously there is different foods but the etiquette and how you're served and everything is way different.

Also street contacting is different. With Hispanics it doesn't feel as weird to walk up to someone and just start talking about the gospel, but when it's with Americans. It's a little more nervracking. Another big change that I have seen is the education level of the people here. All of the people we teach work with Intel and are chemists and stuff, and everyone back in woodburn were lucky if they had finished the 3rd grade! So the conversations are a lot deeper, which at times makes it a little harder to wrap it back around to the gospel, but I'll get the hang of it!

I can't even tell you how many times I've been asked in this past week how I'm related to mitt Romney... Probably about 20 times a week. I always just say he is my dads cousin, which I know technically isn't really correct... But it's close enough! But can someone find out what our actual relationship with him is? Haha we have an investigator who is absolutely in love with mitt Romney.... Like she worships him and has read every book about him. When we sent her a text and it had our last names in it, she immediately called back and was like, is that a Romney I see on the text?! Haha she freaked out and couldn't wait to meet me! It's a good thing I'm not in Portland, because then I would have to lie and say that I am not related to him because they don't really like him over there!

One thing that I have noticed about myself since I have left in my mission is that before, I didn't really like to read or anything like that, but since having been out here I'm like a sponge for information! I love sitting down and talking with the people here. There are some brilliant people here and it's fun to talk and learn from them during dinner and things like that. I've had this new hunger of wanting a ridiculous amount of information in my head and I just want to study everything, but don't have the time for it. So you best be saving up some good books for me when I get back home (;

So, we have one investigator who is progressing really well and we are taking her to the temple next Saturday and that will be fun and then we are teaching 2 Indian kids (from India) and they are incredibly intelligent and have already read the Book of Mormon and are reading it to their friends at school and they are 14 and 15. We plan to baptize them in the next month or so. The ward here is awesome and they are super missionary minded, so we plan to capatalize on that as much as possible.

Things are going awesome here and I'm loving it and being a zone leader is such a blessing and I love serving those around me!

I love you all so much! Love elder romney(: