No more threesome?

email 6/28/10
Well, Maria passed her baptismal interview, but her family continues to play this hypocritical role by telling her that they're 'understanding' and 'accepting' of her decision to be baptized, but also telling her that she's not allowed to be baptized. She said that, no matter what, she's being baptized 1 month from now. The only reason her family wants her to wait is so that they can try to fill her with anti-Mormon garbage and get her to change her mind, like they've been doing since the beginning. Oh well, Maria stays strong and does everything she needs to do. We just pray that 1 month will be a very short time.
Elder Russell's unfortunate companion who has been stuck in the MTC for the past 4 months is finally coming to Rhode Island this week. His doctor cleared him today, and he's flying out tomorrow. Elder Russell is pretty excited to finally have his trainee here, and we're pretty excited to be able to split up our 'huge' area into 2 'manageable' areas again. I'm getting a completely fresh area that hasn't even been touched yet. I'm pretty stoked—there are a lot of things I want to do with it. First thing: I'll be working on starting up a teaching pool from scratch. It's both exciting and daunting, but I'm looking forward to it. Elder Cohen is really excited to get out of the threesome so that he can take as long as he wants in the bathroom in the morning again. He'll learn to speed up once he gets transferred to a foursome.
I've been translating again the past 2 Sundays, but from Spanish to English. We've had stake high councilmen visiting our ward, and I've been translating in the meetings for them. It's really different translating from Spanish to English instead of English to Spanish—it works my brain in a TOTALLY different way. I'm getting pretty good at translating, though. I hope to continue to be able to practice translating—it's a really useful skill that the Lord has blessed me with. It's still REALLY difficult to translate in real-time, especially when a Dominican or Puerto-Rican is speaking, because they speak really fast with really terrible accents where they slur all of their words together and truncate syllables. Yuck! Sometimes, Americans are just as terrible to translate for. I never realized how fast we speak in English until I had to translate. I've gained a much greater appreciation for public speakers who can pace themselves and speak clearly from the pulpit—they are few and far between.
Elder Russell has been sick for the past couple of weeks with some stomach problems, and several times this week he needed to stay home for the afternoon. We got really organized with our ward missionaries and members, and we went on TONS of splits and exchanges. We actually got a lot accomplished despite the setbacks. It's been really fun to branch out and teach with other people too. This Saturday, we organized an afternoon where all the elders in my district and I are going on splits with young men from the ward. We've all got appointments set up to see either investigators or less-active families, and we hope to motivate the young men to serve missions. If all works well with this activity we plan to do it once or twice a month.
We're just getting ready to split the area, and not too much else happened this week, but this week should be pretty crazy. With the 4th of July coming up this Sunday, there's a lot of cool things that the city or Providence is doing. There is so much history here, it's insane. That's one thing that the West Coast sure doesn't have. I would still rather live in the West, though. I'm so happy to be where I am and to be doing what I'm doing. I'm really living the dream out here in Providence. This is truly the 'promised land'.
With much love from your favorite elder,
-Elder Shepherd