Aloha!! Feb. 16th, 2014

Thanks for the happy birthdays even though my birthdays not for a couple days haha. There's not really any change from 20 to 21 since an 18 yr old here has the privilege to anything they want to do. They call the year you have in the mission your holy year haha. So My whole time being 20 yrs old I was holy haha. I hope to stay this diligent my whole life, not just on my mission.

Well we have a war at home with a rat. It's about 1 1/2 feet long and fat. We almost caught him this morning but he got the better of us and jumped over our traps and our sticky traps didn't even phase him either haha, we got like 3 baby rats though.

We worked really hard this past week. We taught 5 first lesson lessons to new investigators and got 10 new investigators. Also we had a solid 5 investigators at church. The Cornel family went to church again and passed their baptismal interview. they will be baptized next Sunday. The exciting part about them though is that their oldest daughter, who moved in with her boyfriend a couple months ago and got pregnant, went to church and is starting to change! We are going to try and get her baptized next month.

We also had our zone conference last week and learned a lot. Our president is super funny I love him. We ate KFC for lunch and had a huge lecture about drinking water. I've been drinking (clean) 3 liters of water a day for the past couple of months now. Our president shared a couple cool stories about his mission and his life. As a college student one day he said he saw his teacher in the front of the room tossing his chalk up and down thinking intently saying, "Joseph Smith, Joseph smith, Joseph Smith." When the class started (this was a college course, philosophy) the teacher said, who in this class here are mormon? President said he was nervous and didn't want to stand up but the spirit prompted, "Stand up" so slowly he started to stand up and said, "I am." The teacher had him come to the front of the class room. The teacher asked him in front of the whole class, "How do you know the Joseph Smith is a Prophet?" Nervously, yet guided by the spirit he simply said the words, "I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God." and went and sat down. The room was utterly silent and since that day he said the teacher never mention Joseph Smith or anything about our church again. They all felt the spirit from such simple words. I say that we as missionaries whether full time or not should stop complicating things and speak simply when testifying to our friends and family of the truths of the gospel.

So in respond to a question, in our mission we only have 1 stake but my district is really really close to becoming a stake, we're working really hard to make it happen.

I love you all so much! Keep the faith!

Elder Kapeliela