Elder AJ Halling Boston Massachusetts Mission: Hard weeks build character, right?

So first off I want to say thank you to Cindy and Brax & Trey for the letters they sent me! That made me so happy!

This week was the hardest week of my mission, by far. Thanksgiving was great, and I'll talk about that a bit later. But other than that, every appointment of ours fell through. every. single. one. We were lined up to teach about ~14 lessons this week and we ended up teaching 2 unplanned and an english lesson. So many people either canceled on us, or just weren't there when we showed up. So here's something you probably don't know: When it rains, Haitians don't like to leave their houses. So this week was pretty rainy and we're led to believe that that's one of the big causes of this week.

Thanksgiving was fantastic though, we went over to a sister in the ward's house! They had wonderful food, and her family was all there and they were extremely nice. Before dinner, they also stuck us in the living room, where there happened to be a football game on... so we couldn't help but to watch it with her family! And then for dinner it was just buffet style get as much as you want. We ate turkey, ham, biscuits & gravy, rice and beans, legume, haitian mac and cheese, and there was plenty of soda to go around. It was a fantastic night!

The sister who had us over for Thanksgiving, Se' Mona, Elder Bordeau and myself!!

So this week our investigator, Johnny, is struggling a bit. He just has some questions that we can't really give solid answers to, pertaining to the afterlife and other deep topics like that. I really hope he doesn't stop progressing though, he is supposed to be baptized on the 21st of December. It's really hard when things like this come up, because there's not much more that we can do to help him other than just meeting with him and talking through his problems.

Here, we'll do an update on the language. Let's see, I translated for the first time in sacrament this week. That was nuts. I can speak creole decently well now, it's coming. I can hold my own in a conversation, I can talk on the phone and set up appointments, I can teach the preach my gospel lessons, and last night I even participated in an argument in creole. I still have a long long long way to go, but I can see myself improving every day. So that's great!

That's about it for this week. We're moving apartments today! Hooray! No more roaches. This new apartment has an upstairs and a downstairs, carpet in the bedrooms and hardwood floors in the kitchen. It has central heating and air, and it's just in such better condition than our other apartment! I'll include some pictures.