Fall is a-coming.

One way Los-Angelenos know that a change of seasons is coming is that a THICK fog whips up almost every morning. It makes our morning ultimate-frisbee exercises a lot more challenging because it's hard to see the frisbee into all the soup. Of course, we never let that deter us, except in cases of torrential rain, which we will eventually get as the autumn rolls on. Ha ha.

Hi all.

Vitaliy received the holy ghost yesterday and he was pretty thrilled about it. We hope he will be a great addition to the branch. Meanwhile, We WILL have more baptisms rolling in this month. 2 weeks ago, we committed a whole family to baptism next week, and they're REALLY working towards it. The Guzmans have a deaf son named Juan. It's a interesting way HOW we found them. last month, we had a dinner appoint with the Gillespie family from our Branch. Kim Gillespie intended to cook us some dinner but her son spilled the sauce, which made dinner pretty much kaput so she asked us to fetch some pizza which she'll cover. Ok, will do. So we stopped at nearly La Pizza Loco (Home of the enormous 32 incher, by the way) and got some large pizzas. While waiting, we noticed a boy with an cochlear implant (That's Juan) so my companion and I struck up conversation to get his attention. We found that his home is in ASL south's area so we referred him there and they taught Juan. When the ASL program areas was split and re-organized, Juan's family surprisingly fell into OUR area so we took up the teaching. The Guzman family mostly speak Spanish so we had the Zone Leaders (We're tight with them so we pulled in some favors) and sometimes some spanish members from our branch to help out. The whole family totally absorbed everything we taught them and asked many questions. The father, Juan Sr., even gave up coffee BEFORE any missionaries taught him at all. I could call them a "Golden" family but they don't have a car and they have a broken home so that's a challenge.

Well, our branch is s l o w l y becoming a Ward. Yesterday, our Branch president reorganized the sacrament-passing process and also introduced Priesthood opening exercises, as every other ward has. We're pretty excited about it.

Recently, I thought about something. Los Angeles is one grand melting pot of different cultures, with all kind of different languages, especially among the deaf, but American Sign Language is such a wonderful tool of communication that binds all of them together and I guess that's why our small branch is one of the most culturally diverse in the church. We have White, Black, Hispanic, Latino, Hawaiian, Native American, Samoan, Korean, Chinese, and French, to name some, and now we enjoy a Russian among us. Truly, our branch alone is proof of partial fulfillment of the prophecy that the gospel shall be preached to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.

Bye for now.

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-E.T. {0 ^ 0} __o
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