Rain and Sun Together

So, I've had an interesting week. Some good and some bad. I now know why Romford has been referred to as a land of iniquity as of recently. There are a lot of tragedies that occur in this town. One of our less active members was recently beaten up by her boyfriend who had both too much to drink and was on "sniff" or drugs... so she was really shaken up this past week. He had abused her for a long time. I had met the guy once before he beat up this poor girl and I wasn't too fond of him. Just drinking and smoking in the house. It makes me glad that we have commandments that keep us from becoming like him. I know you guys probably won't ever met her, but I've seen how some people's poor choices cause a lot of suffering in their lives.

Maybe, on a happier note I had a really good work over or companion exchange with my good Welsh friend Elder Carder. Good Man. It was a bit of a relief to be able to speak to someone that speaks fluent English at least for the day. I'm working with my companion a lot to improve his English, but sometimes you just need a break. So, I've learned the value of a good companion exchange.

On the not-so-sunny side we were tracting yesterday and knocked on some guy's door. He didn't answer at first so we moved to the next door. Just after knocking on the next door, this half-dressed, bald guy comes out of the door we just knocked, cussing and swearing, and telling us how worthless we are and that we just share filth. Obviously, he said a lot of other unmentionable things, and if Mom was here this guy would probably be dead. (When I am afraid and confronted I try to act toughJ --MOMOMOOM) I was actually fearful that this guy was going to hit us or something. I'm not sure if he was drunk of not... but it would not surprise me one bit if this guy was slammed. We didn't stick around long enough to find out. So that was actually my first hellfire experience. I thought it would have happened sooner than now, but I guess it comes eventually.

Some blessed land is Romford, right? :P I actually really love this place. It just has a lot of good and bad. So I'm doing all right at the moment. Nothing too bad... just trying to avoid spending all my money in this place:P Lots of expenses here. Plus, I'm going to have to spend like three hours cleaning today, but at least we are planning on going to Costco this afternoon!! :) (Son like Mother.) I'm really excited to go back to the land of America for a few hours (lol).

I hope you enjoy the pictures from this past week. Some were from the Elder Ballard thing in London, and the rest are throughout the week. The girls are the sisters from our Area. We tend to hang out with them a lot. So cool. Regular people from Utah... It’s nice to have some normal people around to keep us sane :P

Anyway I hope your week long camps were fun. I haven't gotten to go exploring or hiking, or nature walking for quite a while... so you'll have to take me on some camp outs when we get home. Give Mark my regards. He's going to love BYU. I can't wait till I get to go back there... it’s gonna be marriage central :P I'll try to postpone the marriage thing for as long as possible... but as Mom and Dad probably both know BYU is kinda a hard place to avoid marriage :P Anyway have a good week.

Love,

Elder Bradley Smith

Romford Days

Hey,

I've been having a lot of fun in this place. We actually get Travel Money :)! So pretty much every day we just take the buses everywhere we need to go in Romford. Apparently Romford has the best bus system in all of England. All the buses are on time and quite frequent, I've really been impressed with the public transportation in this country. Really, really,  good. So I was a bit stressed at first when I had to shove everything in my bags... and move my whole life to Romford. That wasn't too easy. I used vacuum pack bags to fit most of my stuff, and I'll show you some fun photos of what that was like :P My new companion is from Brazil. I really thought sometime on my mission I was going to get a Brazilian. Just my luck :P Just kidding, He's a great kid. Only been out for 6 weeks, so taking over the area and not knowing anything hasn't really helped me out to much :P So its been a huge learning curve for the past few days. I'm enjoying the nicer weather for the past few days. Sunshine has been out, and I'm getting sunburned again, what a relief. It’s better than getting wet :P So I feel I'm finally getting the hang of the area, so I'm not quite so stressed anymore. My companion has been feeling quite ill this week though because he caught some cold or something and it’s just making him feel tired and headaches all the time, but I'm 100% healthy. The only thing that Elder Oliveira doesn't like is that he thinks he isn't working hard enough. So he's in this cycle of feeling sick, yet he wants to work harder so he's stressing himself out. So I've been trying to help him calm down, and just relax a little. Apparently his trainer was just a machine, and just was WORK, WORK,WORK. The kid never had a break, so now that I'm trying to learn everything and catch up, my companion is stressing out that we are not doing as much work as we could. And I promise you we are not lazy. I've literally hit my pillow and I'm out every single night this week. So it’s been a long week. It’s interesting to see that Mark has graduated. He got my same GPA LOL. 3.94, Yep, I think I was something close to that, I may be wrong. At least Mark gets to live in a super posh place. New Heritage is really nice. I think I'll just live from home when I get back, you know... save money and stuff... but you guys probably will want me to move out anyway :P but you don't have to worry about that for 14 months or so. I can't really believe that is June already. I remember just a while back when it was freezing January and wondering when summer was going to come. Interesting how time flies, yet some days feel so slow...Yet the time passes by very quickly. I'm betting this transfer is going to go by very quickly. Romford is a huge place, one of the biggest areas in the mission. And we have to cover it all by bus :P So it’s going to be fun. Plus I like being the senior companion. Let’s you have a little flexibility if you know what I mean. I think everything is going to be just fine here. We have an enormous mall that has literally every kind of shop that you can think of... so we are going to go exploring today and have a bit of fun. I didn't get to many photos this week, so I'll get some more and share them with you next week. I always seem to be making this promise :P I hope you guys have had a good week. Hey, 151A North Street, Romford Essex RM1 1ED. That is our flat Address in Romford, just so you can send me post and stuff. If you could send me a letter so I could have something to show the library so I can get a card that would be great. 

Love,

Elder Bradley Smith