Mission Split! email from 2/25

Well the big news for this week is our mission split that will be happening this summer! Crazy! They are creating a new mission called the Virginia Chesapeake mission somewhere nearby. They will be taking from our mission both the Fredericksburg and Woodbridge (our) stakes and putting them into the Richmond VA Mission. So I'm not particularly sure what that means for us here in woodbridge at that time. If just everyone in those two stakes will get put into the Richmond mission or what. That would be kind of a bummer to leave DC South behind after being here for so long at that point. But I will be alright with it either way haha. It's amazing to see just how fast the church is expanding though! The amount of missionary applications received every week has gone from 700 to over 4000 since this past October and will continue to grow into this summer. Lots and lots of new missionaries haha. This week has been a good one overall though! With our current lack of people to teach we have been doing all that we can to find new people to teach haha. We found a sweet mobile home park in our area that we have been spending lots of time knocking on doors in and we've had some pretty great success so far! We found 3 new people to teach and they area doing great! Hopefully we'll  be able to see them continue to do progress as we keep meeting with them. Also this past week we had interviews with President Riggs, he's such a great guy. You just feel inspired to go out and work hard and be a better person after talking to him haha. We talked with him quite a bit about changes in the zone though and man are there lots of bike areas coming into the mission! They are expecting by the end of this year that only zone leaders and Sister missionaries will have cars. So lots of our car areas are already getting switched over to bike, there's going to be lots of unhappy Elders about that for awhile I imagine haha. We also went on exchanges with the assistants to President Riggs this past week (the AP's or Apes in mission lingo) so that was fun. My temporary companion was a guy named Elder Mankwenkwe from South Africa, so I got to learn all sorts of cool stuff about South Africa haha. It was sweet. We're also having a pretty big problem with bed bugs here in the mission. I really really hope we don't get those haha. Turns out they're a real thing haha, they live in anything with fabric, including beds, clothes, sheets, pillows, etc. and then they bite you while you sleep. The missionaries who live across from us have got them bad too! One elder had to get rushed to the ER because he was so itchy that he scratched a wound into his arm and then they crawled into it and he got a bad infection. Crazy haha. So we are housing a few of the missionaries from over there while the exterminator fumigates their apartment. So overall it was quite an eventful week! Haha and a good one as always. But it's about time for me to get running. I hope all of you are having a great week though! I love and miss all of you!