Elder Jacob Kmetzsch: Zone Leader Life

Family,

This has probably been the most tiring week of my mission except for maybe the first or second week of my mission. We have been running around everywhere and just never ever stopping. It has been really fun at the same time and I am really excited to be in Nottingham.

Well the week started with us cleaning and rearranging the whole flat. Some Elders are just not very space efficient. So we fixed that. Then we had a drive to the mission home on Tuesday to help move some things from some of the flats in the Zone. On Wednesday President Leppard came to Nottingham to do a personal district meeting with all of the Districts in the Zone and so we had to prepare the Stake center in the morning and make sure that everyone knew when and where they had to be. Plus we don't know too many of the teams in the Zone so we spent all day shuffling people around and trying to get to know as many teams as we could. It was a long day at the church that got longer when after President Leppard left we had another meeting that night with the Stake President, President Gray. I was a little nervous about all the meetings with a lot of Leadership but we survived and I hope gave a great first impression.

Then Thursday hit and we had an exchange with the Assistants. At the moment we have three assistants because one of the last ones extended his mission for two weeks to help train the new assistant and to make sure things went smoothly with the conference with Elder Ballard. So after the conference he became a traveling assistant and has been visiting most of the zones to help out. It was a really fun exchange. Well it wasn't technically an exchange because he just came to stay with us for a day. But we had a surprise baptismal interview that we had to give. So we got to go to a place called Lincoln and Elder Swinimar (the assistant) got to give his last baptismal interview before he goes home this Wednesday. After the exchange it was a fairly normal weekend. We had a Dinner appointment with a Jamaican family and they made a dish the Elder Smith made for me a few weeks back. I'm gonna miss my Jamaican, but he is doing great without me. Church was pretty great. I really like the ward here in Nottingham, they actually have 3 wards in the city and we are in the Nottingham 1st ward. We share the ward with a set of Sister missionaries who are really awesome. One is from Italy and the other is from Romania. So I am the only American in the Ward cause Elder Shaw is from South Africa. Elder Shaw is pretty awesome, we have served around each other a few times before and I always thought that it would be way cool to serve with him. He has been out for 20 months and has been a zone leader for a long, long time. It is really nice to have a companion that is older than me and knows what he is doing. I took that for granted until the last 6 months or so, ha ha. But Zone Leader Life is crazy....