more for week 1

Dear Family,
Hello from Alabama! everything is going great and i am having a great time. im also learning so much. i landed in tallahassee on tuesday where we met the mission president and his wife. you could feel the humidity as soon as you walked off the plane. my luggage as well as most other missionaries was on a latter flight so we didnt get all of it until like 9:30. but i have it all so its good. our plane from Atlanta was a small jet so most of the passengers were missionaries. it was really fun! we met President Smith and they took us to the Chapel accross from the mission home because there were too many missionaries to fit in the home. we had dinner and had an orientation where we signed a bunch of stuff and went over rules and stuff. President Smith is great and very funny. after all that some of us went to a nice hotel for the night and others stayed at the mission home. we all met again at the chapel to have breakfast and get our luggage and bikes loaded into the transfer vans. i ended up buying that bike from the elder going home for $350, its a nice bike and has everything i need but i didnt really want to spend that much. since i was going to Atmore i had to ride the transfer van for a couple hours, then load all my stuff into a car to ride the rest of the way to my area. Thats where i left Elder Jackman, hes serving in the Mexico City Beach area, so im a little jealous. he was amazing and he’ll make a great missionary. when i got to our appartment i met my new companion, Elder Collet. he’s tall, skinny and wears glasses. hes really shy too, so we dont really talk much. but we took my luggage in and got straight to work. we went to see an investigator named Jerry Ard, who theyve been teaching for a while now. he is set to be baptized this saturday so that is really cool. hes an older fellow about 65 or something. we stay busy with visiting people. its really hard to find investigators since atmore is such a small town. almost every single door has been knock on by the missionaries and people are so set with their beliefs that they wont even listen. so most of our work in teaching the few investigators we have and then visiting less active members, teaching them a spiritual thought, inviting them back to church and hopefully getting referals from them. most of the less active are part member families so its hard to even give a spiritual though because the non-member doesnt like us trying to convert them. so sometimes we just talk to them. Atmore is mostly retired people so they dont get much company. they just talk and talk and talk. so even if we want to give a lesson we cant get a word in to do so. but the people are great, its hard to understand what some of them are saying sometimes because they all have southern accents. i havent had much southern food yet but im sure it will be interesting. thats pretty much whats been going on, we visit as many people as we can trying to get referals, and then teach our 4 investigators when they are free. we have one investigator that is amazing. his name is Joshua Jay, hes 22 and he is ready to be baptized. he found out about the church from the broadway musical and referred himself. we got his information and started teaching him. he has obviously done a lot of research about the church because he already knows everything. weve taught him the first 3 lessons now and he is reading the book of mormon and praying. Saturday night were were able to teach him at some members home and it went very well. we had dinner at the Jones’s house then sat down for the lesson. we taught about the Doctorine of Christ and how we need faith, repentance, baptism and the holy ghost in our lives. also how to endure to the end, how its a cycle that we go through everyday and how we renew our covanants at sacrement. it went very well. sunday was good because i got to meet everyone in the branch and stuff, there arent that many people at all and some of them drive for like 40 minutes to get there. it was funny, elder collett and i blessed the sacrement and afterwards when brother Jones (the first counciler) thanked the Aaronic preisthood for the reverent manner we passed the sacrement, the electric piano started going crazy and playing all these random notes. it was right at the perfect time, what a way to remember my first sunday. anyways i think thats all.
Thanks for Everything,
Love Yall
Elder Baling