Elder Zach Greene: Who Said I Couldn't Go Foreign?!

Hola!

This past week has been so awesome! I won't mince words cause I'll try to tell you as much as I can!

I am serving in the most ghetto (and most fun) area of the mission, East Baltimore! My address is 24 N. Linwood Ave. Baltimore, MD 21224 (for my package(s) and so you can look this place up on Google Earth or something). Anyways this place is awesome. Its so opposite to everywhere I've ever lived. For starters, everyone is either black or Espano. The Spanish people are usually from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala. Oh and if you find white people they're usually drunk or high. The city has trash everywhere and there are always sirens going off (honestly cause this place is bad news bears, my companion calls it Babylon). J-Walking is our missionary way of travel, no bikes or cars. Sometimes bus though. Oh and there are huge foot-long rats here, they're sick! My companion is Elder Rose. He is from Morgan, Utah and he is an awesome missionary. He served in Baltimore West and Toussen (the other areas of our district) but he has never served in this area. It's called shotgunning I guess, when two missionaries enter an area completely new. Anyways we got to the apartment, unpacked for 15 minutes, and hit the streets. It was crazy that first day. I couldn't understand much, and we contacted a lot of people. But after doing stuff all day, we eventually met Melvin, Sulema, and Jose. We taught them the first discussion right there on their patio. Melvin was the most affected, he's 20ish and they are from Honduras. I even got to recite the first vision and bear my testimony! But yeah they became our first new investigator. (Melvin is the only one who is progressing now).

At first missionary work was hard. And not for the reasons I thought it would be. I thought street contacting or knocking doors would be the hard part. The hard part is really just telling your body to not be tired and to just work. But after 4 days or so I'm not as tired and I am really starting to love missionary work! Spanish is coming right along, you learn fast cause you're talking to Spanish people all day. (Me more listening than talking, but give me a couple more weeks). But yeah I can street contact by myself now, as long as they don't say anything too unusual that I don't understand. I also got to challenge a woman Maritza yesterday to baptism! So I'm still getting to do all the fun stuff, haha.

Our branch is small but awesome. The whole congregation is probably smaller than the young women in our Ward. But we have ten branch missionaries! They are going to help a ton. I love it here and even though this place would normally be kinda scary, I'm a missionary and honestly I've never been afraid here, hahah.

It sounds like everyone is doing awesome. Macey's EFY sounds sweet! It's crazy to hear how everyone is getting older and I'm not around, I'm not sad or anything, it's just weird. Jared props to you and all your accomplishments hahah. I love all of you, I don't have a whole lot of time to E-mail everyone but I'll try to send some letters out in the next couple weeks. Have fun in Tahoe!

Love,

Elder Greene