Hello, how are you?!?!?!? =D

Ok, so I feel like yesterday was P-day. Time flies so fast!!!Right after I finished emailing you, my comp and the Spanish Hermanas were walking out of the library and met a deaf man who does Mexican sign language! He's a member and has a brother in one of the singles wards. I triesd to talk to him, and realized how much MSL I've forgotten. Things started to come back to me as he signed things that I remembered. It was really cool and interesting to try to communicate with that language barrier.Nothing really new this week according to missionary work. Just trying to find new people and dropping old people who are not progressing. Really, I have felt this whole time that something has been missing, but I didn't know what. I'm new at this whole missionary thing and I talked to my trainer about it, but she had no answer. I prayed and prayed but nothing came to me, and still I had this feeling like we could be doing so much more than what we were doing. It was really kinda frustrating. Well, yesterday we had Elder Steuer from the 70 come and speak at our zone conference. It was amazing! He answered every concern I had about doing more. Basically he changed the way we do everything here. Instead of talking to people and getting a bunch of addresses and phone numbers it's more of finding people who are really interested by peaking their curiosity. I can't really explain it, and that was a bad try, but I'm soooooo excited for this next week to try some new things and make this feeling of not using my limited time here effeciently go away. It is going to be so good!Did you know that the number of people that get baptized in Brazil is actually the number worldwide. For every 20 people the missionaries talk to in Brazil 1 person gets baptized. That's the average worldwide. Here in DC it's 35:1. We've got a lot of work to do here, and it's about time we do it.Now to answer all of moms questions about ASL. No I hardly ever get a chance to use ASL. MAYBE once a week if I'm lucky I can talk to a deaf person for 30 min. I gave a tour at the VC yesterday for the deaf Elders and one of their investigators, but the last time I used it was last week. Both me and my companion are in the English program so I don't use ASL at all in my area. In fact, never. In the VC it's a little different. We always have our mission companion but at the VC we don't stick with a companion. We greet people and give tours by ourselves. Therefore I am the only sister that knows ASL. As far as my Pres. knowing about me doing ASL....yeah, but he doesn't feel the need to have me serve as an ASL missionary when there's no other sister that knows it, and there's not enough work as it is with the 6 ASL elders here. So I serve in English and do what I can.I live in an apt (actually outside of my area so we have to drive to our area, and drive to the VC) in Silverspring MD. My area is called Derwood, but it consists of Derwood, Olney, party of Gaithersberg, and probably some uninhabited place with no name. I don't know, it's really beautiful, and VERY diverse ethnically as well as economically. We'll go from one house that's more like a castle and then go to our next appointment in a ghetto neighborhood. We actually had a question about some house as to whether it was an actual house or a church....or if it used to be a church cuz it was huge! and it had a room with a bunch of pews in it....but then it had a little cutesy crafty welcome sign at the massive doors and a welcome mat as well. So we knocked and this man came to the door just like everything was a normal home. Weird. Some people and their mansions. I have noticed here though that we don't have billboards, at least where I'm at there are none. There's so many trees that line the streets you can barely see the street signs! There would be no way to put in a billboard.2 women came into the VC this week from AZ, and one of them kept looking at my nametag, and finally she said "Witbeck, I know that name. I used to know a boy named Witbeck back in college."I said "...his name wouldn't happen to be Ryan would it??"to which she replied "YES! How did you know! Do you know him??""He's only my oldest brother!"It was quite a surprise =]. She wrote her name and address on a paper that I accidentaly left at home (so Ryan if you want her address I guess you're just gonna have to write me =]). She said she had never let anyone borrow her car before and the first person ever was Ryan who then got into an accident (she made sure to mention that it wasn't his fault), and she never let anyone borrow her car again. hahahaha I laughed really hard when she told me that story =] as I'm sure you can guess. Her first name is Kammy, but I can't remember her last name or maiden name. She took a pic of us and I gave her moms email and my old one so she could send it....not sure if you've already gotten it, but if you have that's the story behind that one. Hilarious! Now you all know a little dirt on Ryan =D I'm sure it makes you very happy. Anyways, mom also wanted to know what I do on p-days....my companion doesn't like to do anything special, so we clean in the morning (wash our car and clean our apt) get ready for the day, study personally and as companions, then we come here to the library and email home for 30 min. then go shop for food, go home and write letters till 5ish, eat and drive to our area to do some more missionary work. Really "p-day" consists of the time between 10am and 5:30pm. We have a lot of stuff that we have to get done, so we don't have a whole lot of time to do anything extra.Well, I hope you are all doing well! I love and miss you all. Take care!!!!!!!!!!!

~Sister Witbeck~