SYL and Family History Work - missionary style

Dear friends and family,

It was another good week, full of teaching opportunities. We're really good at getting in the door, so that’s good.  We’re just still working on helping our investigators progress.

This week was tough because it was stake conference, so church was at a different time, different place, and kinda far away. However Heng was still going to come, but he got sick. And Soroth promised he was going to come but didn't. Grrr! The good news with Soroth is that now he has another baptismal date!  It's not until July 31st but hey, it's something.  It was interesting because in one of our lessons with Soroth this week we brought up the marriage thing again and Citha,  his girlfriend, chimed in and was like "if he gets me a ring and asks me properly and stuff, I'll marry him." So that was good to hear that at least one side is down to do this thing. We'll just work with Soroth and see if we can't make it happen even earlier :) We figure if we get him out to a baptismal service, or maybe even to the temple’s Visitor Center, it's game over.

Another highlight was that we met with this sweet old lady named Sokhom Ear. She's this awesome, inactive member of the church who just loves the missionaries. Every week she'll call us and ask if we'll come over and visit her. Then she always has a table full of snacks and things prepared for us. And she often sends us home with a box of American food that she doesn't know how to eat. Really sweet lady, and something we look forward to. After we saw her this week I actually forgot my scriptures at her apartment so we had to run back and grab them. Being the nice person she is, she was just sitting at the door with my scriptures all ready to go and an apple wrapped in a napkin :) She's so sweet. Anyways, in our lesson with her, we taught her about family history work! We shared about the plan of salvation, the spirit world, and a little about the temple. It went really well and she said she'd start filling out her pedigree chart. We realized we really need to do this with all of our members!  Family History work is where it’s at. Elder and Sister Butler just got here from Utah to serve a senior couple mission and right now they are just looking for ways they can help. We figured it would be perfect if they helped with the family history stuff. As missionaries we can't really get on computers to figure everything out, but they can. Also it'll be so good for everyone in our ward, since so many are converts.  They can easily start filling out these pedigree charts and getting names ready. The only challenge for them will be getting enough information, since a lot of records were destroyed in the Khmer Rouge. It'll be great though, because it'll hopefully get them excited and pumped to go to the temple, which will keep them progressing in the gospel! Cool idea right? We're excited.

Elder Sturgell and I are "SYLing" (Speak Your Language) all day everyday now.  All day everyday means no English in the car, in the morning, at meals, after planning, nothing. We've done it for the last four days now and I think and it's going pretty well. I honestly haven't spoken five words of English to him during that time. I don't think anyone else would be willing to do something like this but he says he's enjoying it so far and that it helps him a lot. It helps me too! He's willing to work which is so great! That's just what we're trying to do, work hard, have faith in the Lord, and pray for miracles. 
Then we figure good things should follow.

Well, love you all! Thanks for all your support!

Elder Hicken