Email received November 4, 2013

Dear family,
Sorry for writing so early for you guys but today is a holiday here. Halloween kinda works like this here i guess, its a whole weekend. So basically its been halloween for the past few days here. the 31st was super crazy though because the day before Boston won the world series and Bani is full of Boston fans. Haha we heard the loudest cheers and all manner of shenanigans that whole night. Something kinda funny about Dominicans is they dont know that the United States are more than just new york and boston. They always assume thats where im from so just to help them out a bit i say i am from a campo a cerca de Nueva York se llama Utah. Im honestly doing really well. For the first time in a while we had more than one investagator attend church. Its been raining a lot here and the problem with our branch is that its huge and people can only afford motorcycles so when its raining its almost too dangerous to come to church but there are definitely some faithful members. I was pretty scared to death yesterday though ha not for my life or anything but we had this guy julio nunez show up to church. We were absolutely thrilled and i explained that this is a fast sunday and we will hear testimonies of the members to him. Then Jugo stood up. We love jugo a lot but he said some things he really shouldn´t have over the pulpit and then to make matters worse the district president stood up and called him out on it in front of everybody. Testimony meetings are always super interesting ha but anyway julio said he really loved meeting anyway and that his door is always open and we could visit him whenever. we are working really hard to try and teach the members the doctrine now too. The thing is i know i was called here for a reason and im just trying to do my best to help out this branch. Its all i can do. Predicar mi Evangelio huh? Its a really amazing book. I don´t really know how you did the work before at all but everything in preach my gospel is supposed to be based off what the spirit tells you. We study it like crazy and its super helpful in creating lessons plans that should directly help the persons direct needs. If you guys can try and look up this talk by Jeffery R. Holland he gave at the mtc back in March. I got to watch the brodcast of that in the CCM and it was really helpful to me in trying to become a better preach my gospel missionary. I really love studying in Chapter 6 and also in chapter 10 specifically in the como comenzar enseñar part. I think those really explain what we try to do as missionarys. In truth we aren´t just here to preach the palabra in your faith but we are here to be representatives of jesus christ. So chapter 6 explains what we need to do to be a good representative. This past week we were out tracting and it was raining super hard and we didn´t have umbrellas or anything so we were just getting drenched which kinda helped because more people were letting us in but we came up to this one house and heard this quien invito las mormones? this woman then turned around starred me right in the face and said super sternly no we want nothing to do with you we are catholic for life. I simply told her pues esta bien entonces solo querremos ser amigos y ayuda le. She just kept shaking her head and saying bye so we kept on trudging through the rain. Manubay then talked to me and said its alright i mean we will see her at judgement day right? it got me thinking though. I don´t want to see any of these people at judgement day going in the wrong direction. It really hurts me to even think about. i pray really hard for everybody who rejects the message. I guess what i want to say is missionary work much like the life of Jesus Christ can not be for yourself. Yes it was raining hard and yes its terrible being rejected but its not important. I know its true. I know it will bless these peoples lives so its not worth it feeling sorry for myself. im so happy everything is going well at home. Thanks so much for everything i got a letter from grandma and it made me all teary eyed. Im so happy we are an eternal family. I might be needing a good sweater or two because di que, dominican for supposedly, it gets cold at the end of November.
I love you guys so much,
Elder Spencer W. Hulsey