the work moves forward...

Dear Family,

We get to watch the sessions of conference on saturday and sunday. I can honestly say that I've never been so excited to hear the words of the apostles and prophets. Here I am proclaiming the good news to people in India that we have a prophet on the earth and General Conference is the outward expression to the world of this truth. I'm so excited to sit down and indulge myself in some spiritual refreshment (note from family: if you never watched a General Conference or want to know a little more about it, click here).

This week was a great one. We met a wonderful family on sunday afternoon. They were a referral that we received from the elders out here in the 4th branch. They were teaching this man, Jason Babu's brother. They are all very smart and well educated. It is so lovely to teach people with proficient english. The language barrier consistently presents a problem. But not with this family. They were so excited to hear the message of the restoration. The father graciously accepted our invitation to read the book of mormon. I have a great feeling about this family. I am pretty sure their brother is preparing for his baptism out there in fourth branch, so we'll see if we can’t get his brother's family to follow suit in the second branch.

There is a little incident that happened a week ago from today, its kind of humorous actually. My new district leader, elder ward, and his companion elder mickelson, were walking to their area from our church. They were along walking along a busy road and a man on a scooter drove by. The scooter slowed down and the man reached out his hand and whacked elder mickelson on the back of the head. He proceeded to park his scooter and hopped off. He ran at the companionship while screaming telegu. Mickelson saw a bus crawling along beside him and took no thought, he jumped on the bus. Leaving his companion behind, the telegu guy tried to smack elder ward too, but he blocked it. Then the guy reached down for a huge rock, Elder Ward did not stick around to see what he planned to do with it. He sprinted the other direction. Anyway, the guy got confused and didn’t know how to react. The missionaries may have split up, but in doing so, they kept the disturbance to a minimum. Had they loitered, a mob could have formed and the situation could have escalated into something much worse. Anyway, there continues to be disturbances by certain groups of people here but the work moves forward...

Anyway that’s about all for this week.

Love you,
Elder Tuscano

(below are excerpts from individual letters to family)

There really is so much joy to be found in serving others. I never realized that before. I bet you wish that I would have though. It was great to hear that you enjoyed conference so much.

Brother Atun is really a great guy. His questions are so good and he is so happy when we answer them. When he prays, he always expresses his gratitude for our ability to answer his questions. We look forward to helping him enter the waters of baptism.

We are going to make sure we get a ton of investigators to attend conference this weekend. It will be so good for them to actually see the prophet.

It is interesting to see how the work continues to move forward here. I am gaining a testimony of working through members and other missionaries. Referrals are great! I am almost glad that we cannot find. I am urged to be more creative and use the resources around me. They prove to be better anyway. I am learning a lot about finding people to teach.