We signed a contract to teach English with Mahosot Hospital. We start teaching their doctor staff in Febraury.

 Visiting a buddhist temple. It was really cool.

 Activity we had cleaning our church.

 This is a selfie we took at a church activity. They always make me take these because I have long arms. Haha 

 A funny meme because Laos is land locked.

 The Area Presidency and Mission President came to visit Laos and we had a devotional at the church.

The students love to secretly snap pictures of us and send them to our group chat with everyone.

 I wrote down all the animals I knew in Laotian and English and that was our lesson for the day.

We gave our students treats for Halloween and they wanted to take a picture.

The door of a Buddhist Temple.

My Letter:

Every once in a while, the senior couple of english teachers who teach class right next to us are busy and they don't make it to english class. In those times, Elder Holm who usually teaches with me switches classrooms to cover for them, and I stay in our normal classroom and teach by myself. You would think that teaching English without your usual partner is twice as hard as teaching with them. This is not true. It is much harder. What we usually do is one of us starts teaching while the other one is supporting and thinking about the next part of the lesson, so when whoever is tired of teaching, or runs out of ideas, we switch. This takes about 15-30 minute intervals while we teach, so we keep doing this until class is over. With teaching by yourself, you have to be standing up teaching for a full 90 minutes and constantly thinking about what are teaching next and how you are gonna do it. That just strengthened my testimony of the importance of having a companion in life. (Having a teaching companion as I go about on my mission and also having a wife when I start a family.) It doesn't only cut the work load off by half. It's much more than that. 

Next summer in Thailand, the church is hosting an FSY summer camp for all the youth that want to go! It is combining Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar. I am so excited for them because all of the youth in the corners of the countries who feel like they are alone in the church will meet new friends from all across the country and know there are others who are in their same situation. It will help the youth to have more friends who are members of the church around them instead of only being friends with people from America who served as missionaries there.

I got to interview with President Hammond recently. This was the first time I interviewed with him in Laos. He had a meeting with the government, so President was in Laos for a little bit. It was cool to see him here. I shared with him an idea I had received lately. I want to start an addiction recovery program here in Laos. There are so many people that I see with the fire and motivation to stop drinking, but they are all alone trying to do it. They do a great job trying to stop, but after a while they get burned out with nobody to help them when they feel weak. If we started a group meeting together, it would help them to be strong and bring their friends who also want to stop. President took that idea to the Area Presidency for southeast Asia and said they thought it was a good idea, but it would take a lot more planning and time before it got started. President told us to start working it out and do it as soon as possible.

We were teaching an investigator named Lah. She is the daughter of a member, and she has only come two times to church, but in our lesson with her, she expressed an interest in being a missionary, so that is awesome.

Noah and I had a lot of fun teaching all of our english classes about Halloween. They all had heard about it a ton from facebook, but they had no idea what we do to celebrate. We taught them that little kids had to say trick or treat in order to get their candy, so we told them, "alright, on the count of three, say trick or treat. One, two, three..." "trick or treat" "Oh.. cooome ooooon, that was weak. Come on. Give me some more umph this time! One, two, three!" "TRICK OR TREAT!!!" Then we brought out some treats we bought for all of them. It was pretty fun.

Have a good week!

-Elder Barron