January 8, 2011

Dear Family,
This week was pretty crazy!! We had soooo many meetings. On Tuesday all of the new missionaries arrived safe and sound. They are all with their trainers now. We had some very spiritual meetings and trainings with the trainers and the new missionaries. On Wednesday we had Zone Leader´s Council. It went really well too. We were able to present the new process of following up baptismal goals and investigators. It was amazing. On Thursday and Friday we had meetings with all of the leaders in the entire mission. I was glad that we could talk with the District Leaders. The District Leaders now have a bad culture of just doing everything that their Zone Leaders say and they don´t think for themselves at all. We were very direct with them and they were excited when they left. They all had some pretty good ideas and were going to use them now. I´m really excited to see how this new process is going to be implemented in the zones. We talked to them more about ministering than administering. A lot of Zone Leaders have the culture of worrying too much about paper work and not enough about what their missionaries are actually doing. All of the leaders opened their eyes up a little bit. We´re really excited to see what happens over the next few weeks and months :)
This week we´re going to the heat again. We´ll be in Esmeraldas on Wednesday and Thursday and in Santo Domingo on Friday. We´re excited to go and work with the missionaries in their own sectors on splits this month. I´m excited to go traveling again. It feels like it´s been so long. This round of trainings my companion and I will be doing most of the trainings because President Sloan will be interviewing all of the missionaries in the mission during the month. We´re excited to get back to teaching again. President has done almost everything in the past 2 months.
Well the Taco Family is doing really well. They´ve been coming to church and they are ready for their baptism next Saturday. We´ll have to get the secretaries to visit them so they can keep progressing while we´re out of town. I´m so excited that they´re finally going to get baptized!!!!
I love you all. Thank you for your love and care for me. I´m still receiving Christmas cards and packages. Thank you for remembering me. I love you all!!!!






Love,
Élder Hakes