11 Month Mark!

Hello everyone!

Well its been a wonderful week! I hit my 11 month mark. It was actually a really good day! Well this week Vamsi was confirmed a member of the church so that was awesome! He now has the amazing gift of having the Holy Ghost as his constant companion. I am really happy for that. So this week we met with most of our investigators and they are all doing well. Srinivas is now set for baptism this Sunday so we will see if that works out though. He is a really good guy. Also Rajesh and his family are way cool. So he is the one that was drunk and went and talked to the missionaries. He has come such a long way in such a short time. It is seriously one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. When he first came and talked to us he was getting drunk everyday, wasn't working much, and was about to give up on life. He hasn't had alcohol since we first started meeting with him and he is so happy now. He studies the Bible and the Book of Mormon everyday. He has so many questions about it all the time and it is way funny because even when he doesn't have a doubt and we come to their home he will sit and search through the book until he finds a question. He started taking a bible study class from some pastor and all the people their are giving him anti-mormon questions so now he is asking us and whatever we teach him he goes and teaches all of these people. Haha he is so awesome. Last night he told us that he wants us to teach everything out of the Bible so that he can prove to all these people that our church is true. Everytime we are teaching him and his mom, if he gets a question he sits and raises his hand like we are in school. Its really funny to watch! Anyway. He has come an amazing distance from where he was in such a short time. So we also are teaching the Mulaparthi family. They are having a hard time remembering to read the Book of Mormon, so last night we went with the intent to ask inspired questions and find out why they weren't reading, but after we did that, I think we wrecked them a little too much on reading it but we were still friends at the end of the lesson. so. Success. Haha They are an awesome family as well though. 

Well. Yeah. This week was good. Had some nice chicken biryani. Also. President Berrett came to Rajahmundry this week to have a specialized training. It was really good. We learned a lot about improving our teaching skills. This Zone is very young so it helped a lot. I think more than half of them have been out for less than 6 months so it was good. We are going to start focusing a lot more on practicing and working with the spirit so that we can be effective in our teaching!  Well. Love ya. I hope all is well there. I got my flight tickets to go to the Philippines. So I will fly out of Rajahmundry to Hyderabad at around noon on the 26th, then I will fly to Bangkok at 1AM to 6am then from Bangkok to Manila at like 8AM so I will arrive there at around 12 pm. Pumped for another ridiculously long series of flights. I will be flying there with my MTC companion Elder Ward and with another elder that we came with named Elder Cluff. Both are wonderful gentlemen. So it will be fun. Still have no idea what mission in the Philippines I am going to. Gotta love surprises! Love you all!

Elder Checketts