The Adventures of Elder Hokanson

July 25
Well not too much to say. Remember Sasha/Cаша from my first area? Well I just found out on Monday he was baptized! It’s so awesome! His friend from the ward Vladimir did not baptize him he did not show up, but Sasha is cool and my old companion baptized him - so sweet!!And in my area our investigator pool got small because of vacations, but we did some finding and boosted it a lil bit but our investigator валiя/valya (its hard to spell in English to me but anyway) she has read the BoM 2 times and she has a baptism date for the 11th. When we teach her she has no questions. We wonder, “why?” right? Well, when we leave she uses her friends Russian index of the BoM and gospel principals and the teachings of the prophets to find references to what we teach. Not only that, she does all the homework and then some of what we give her, so when we ask her about her homework, it’s like wow! She has all of it done and understands it better then from what we gave her! The average convert has only read about 7 chapters in the BoM before baptism this is amazingMy back is better for the most part so I stopped taking the pain meds 3 times a day. It was not pleasing to me to take that much. I will be buying my shoes today. Yeah you should see them now - they don’t look so bad but all the padding in my right shoe in the heel is gone. Don’t ask me how that happened. It’s interesting to me the sole is wore down where the ball of my foot is so there is a hole now and the heel has about 1/2 cm before it has a hole and the thread is still holding the shoe together somehow but if you look at my shoes they look fine from far away, but not up close, so its time to buy new ones. I hear the store in the mall has ECCOs on sale so I will take a look. I will be in center Kiev after all.And yes I will be in this area again I am not getting transferred this week! WOOT!!!I love you! I will talk to you all later!