Monday, January 28, 2008

Gunshots in Laredo

Hello to all

We received a phone call last night informing us that President Gordon B. Hinckley, prophet and leader of our church, had passed away. (For full story, see http://newswroom.lds.org/) We were all sad, but happy for him since he was 97 and now he will be able to see his wife, Marjorie, again. Tell Uncle Matt, I am forever grateful for the opportunity he gave me to see President Hinckely last October at Conference in Salt Lake. We are all guessing here that perhaps Elder Jeffrey Holland will be called as a new member of the First Presidency.
After I emailed on Wednesday, I went on splits with Elder Metcalf. He was in a bike area so I was able to get a lot of riding in. It was hard, mostly because we have a car and I haven't ridden a bike that hard in a while. When we got there, we contacted a guy and talked to him on the street for almost 30 minutes. While we were talking to him we heard six gunshots go off down the street. Elder Metcalf said, "Welcome to Laredo," and we laughed. It's really not that dangerous here, but there are some pretty poor areas, and since we are a border town, there's a lot of drugs and stuff that come through Laredo.
All in all, things are great here. It's really warm now, so that's a plus. I'm having trouble finding a place to develop pictures, so I might be sending home a memory stick from my camera for you to get photos from. Tell everyone hi for me.
Ryan