New calling and a big area to work

Dear friends and family,

Well, this last transfer a big change happened. You'll never believe it.

On Saturday, I had the really cool honor of baptizing Menina. Her mother (who has no interest in the church but really likes the missionaries) came! I hope she took something really good from it. That family is slowly converting itself, and I love it!

Starting today, I will be driving in Angola. Pray for me, yeah? I'm excited for it, but man, oh man... It's going to be quite a new experience. Even the Americans who live here that work for oil can't drive--the companies assign drivers.

My new area? Well, I'll stop stalling. I'm with Elder Borden and we're... special. We live in Cassequel, belong to Luanda 1's district, drive, don't have a specific proselyting area, attend church in every branch (we trade every week), talk to memebers, strengthen inactives, and basically do random work. What's our calling? We are Angola's very first office elders. Do we work in an office? No. Do we actually do missionary work? ...No. But we do train every single branch with the church's organizational programs (MLS), work with the finances, and run errands. We will teach whenever we have spare time in whatever area we're in. Is our job pretty awesome? Well, yeah. It's SUPER necessary. The giant mess of the membership records here just scares me. We have 497 members who are lost. We literally don't know where or who they are. We have names. Those are just the ones we know about.

Elder Borden is awesome. Probably my new best friend in the mission. He and I just have a lot of same interests, the same sense of humor, etc. I'm excited to serve with him. We live in a living room for now. Maybe for the entire transfer. Angola can't grow without organization, so we have to train the branches to organize--which is way harder than just organizing it ourselves. It's going to be an adventure and I'm very excited. It's going to be weird to do branch work, but bring it on! I hope the Lord makes us equal to this task.

Well, I love you guys. This church is true. The paperwork side is super necessary. Wish me luck?

Elder Cody R. Eckman