So it's been two weeks in my new area of Andorra! My area is the entire country! And a few small towns outside the town. As well as a town called Llivia which is inside the French borders. It's been such an amazing and interesting area.
So here we have a branch and a group all considered the Andorra branch. We have a service at 10:30 in the morning on Sunday in a town called La Seu d' Urgell (which is where we have most of our members) and a meeting at 3 in the afternoon in Andorra La Vella in a hotel conference room! In La Seu there are about 18-25 active members and in Andorra about 7-10 so this is the smallest amount of members I've ever worked with! We spend a lot of time working in La Seu because that part of the branch lacks priesthood holders. In Andorra there are a few but the problem is the transportation between Spain and Andorra is bad and so the members have their own group in Andorra.
We don't have a lot of friends to teach either, we have one that had potential right now. We find here that knocking doors is a good way of finding people and last week someone actually let us in to meet with them (we almost never knock doors in the mission) and it was actually the first time that had ever happened in my mission that someone let's me in! So it's been crazy.
These last weeks we have been in a trio, I have 2 companions! But the problem is this week they called one of them, Elder Holland to serve in the mission office... so were going to be 2 again. I'm going to have to take over the area and the training of my companion Elder Rippey after 2 weeks so pray for me to be able to work hard and accustom myself quickly to the area. So much to know and learn here!! (our apartment in Andorra is super tiny. To give you an idea, we share a mini fridge between three missionaries...., but with two it should be easier).
Andorra is super pretty! It's an interesting place: it has about 70,000 citizens and more tourists than citizens. It is between France and Spain and is it's own country. The people here speak Catalan as an official language as well as Spanish and French, and Andorra is not part of the European union so crossing the border is harder and leads to a lot of funny stories ( I could send a whole email on just the stories of crossing the border).
Today we had a preparation day as a district with the zone leaders and it was probably the prettiest and most fun preparation day of my mission! We had district meeting in the morning, than the elderly couple in Andorra made us Mexican food for lunch! Then we went to a gondola that took us up to a great view of Andorra! We went into the shop and I bought a north face jacket for 35$ (it costs 130$ normally but in Spain we have summer sales and everything is Andorra is marked even lower on top of the sales so 5 of us bought jackets and took up that steal). We wore the jackets together and went to a mountain close to the border with France and explored a little. On the mountains we found a huge group of free range horses! And we took a bunch of videos and pictures and then played a little bit of frisbee in the mountains! It's an incredible place!
That was my week. I'm sure you'll have a ton of questions so send me an email and I'll answer them;)
Have a great week!!
Elder Keith
