llanelli

I'm in Llanelli! I bet you're wondering where that is. Well, its in Wales. Just down the road from Swansea. And right next to the beach. Not a ton of missionaries get to serve in multiple countries on their mission or on the coast, but I am getting to do both. Its pretty awesome. Now you should know how to pronounce Llanelli properly. Suprisingly enough, it is even less intuitive to pronounce than Gloucester. The pronunciation for Gloucester doesn't make much sense becasue it comes from Olde English. The pronunciation for Llanelli isn't English at all. Its Welsh. To be able to pronounce it properly, you need to know how to make the double L sound in welsh. Here's how you do it: put your teeth together and open your lips a little bit. Then push some saliva out of the sides of your teeth. Now you know how to pronounce "Ll" in welsh. And now you should be able to pronounce Llanelli properly. I'm sure you feel really ridiculous doing it, but I promise that really is how you pronounce it. You can youtube it or something if you don't believe me. The accent down here is crazy. Its absolutely hilarious though, I love it. Especially when two welsh people are going at each other. Thats when it gets really hilarious.

My companion here is a kid from Spanish Fork, Utah named Elder Gull. I'll get you a picture of him eventually. Probably. He's a way cool kid and excited to do the work. We're gonna tear it up. He has been in the mission field for 5 weeks less than me (my first transfer was a 5 week transfer). So that's a bit crazy. But that is what is happening all over the mission because about 100 of the 260 missionaries in our mission came out with me or after me. So our mission is extremely young. Some other people from my group are with people from the group after me, like I am, some are training, and some are district leaders all ready. Its crazy! But its so exciting because the work is pressing forward. So I guess I technically have that "senior companion" title now, which is a bit scary because it means I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. Which I don't feel like I do. But with the Lord on our side we'll be all right. So we'll have to make sure we stay on His side and give him the credit that He deserves for everything that ever happens in the mission field.

A few weeks ago an awesome guy was baptized here, so we are going to be making sure he and his wife (who was already a member) are on the road to temple marriage! Its way cool. Other than that, there are not a whole lot of investigators here, so we are going to be doing a lot of finding new people to teach. We'll have to get creative--some ideas we will be pressing forward with are setting up a booth in town centre and drawing the Plan of Salvation somewhere with sidewalk chalk. Aside from that, we'll just need to talk to absolutely everyone we can. This is a new challenge for me (and I am a bit scared, to be sure) because in Gloucester we always had plenty of people to teach. But we'll just have to rely on the Lord a lot. We'll do our best and know that whatever happens is his will. Being a missionary is great. I highly recommend it.

Love,

Elder Seth Poulsen