I really had an interesting week this week! I found out I was being transferred Saturday so I packed up all my stuff Monday. I realized that I had a lot more stuff than I need, so I might be sending some stuff home soon. I have a huge notebook with all your letters in it, can I send it home to ya'll? Tuesday, my last day in Hartsville with Elder Whatcott we were biking down a hill and Elder Whatcott was riding in the bike lane and he got too close to the curb and slid over and scraped up his arm pretty good. I think that he is ok now. Wednesday was transfers. My new companion is Elder Jones, Elder Whatcott's MTC companion and Elder Haslem, my MTC companion is in the same district as I am- REALLY COOL! There are four missionaries in Sumter, my new area and we share a pretty big ward of about 200 active people. There are about 500 less active people in the ward. Sumter is a pretty interesting city. Its pretty big, you can probably look it up online and learn about it. There is an air force base here and we have a wonderful Senior couple here on a mission who are on a military relations mission at the base. They help us out a lot and they are really nice..
Wednesday night, the first night in our new area, Sumter, we were talking in our living room about Sumter. We were sitting on couches and Elder Read was sitting in a large Wicker chair with a large cushion on it. We abruptly stopped the conversation, oddly, and decided to pray and start our planning session. About 30 seconds into the prayer we heard a gunshot from above, we paused in our prayer and looked up and saw large chunks of plaster descending from the ceiling above us. We silently looked around, then looked at each other and finished the prayer. After the prayer we started looking around and saw a bullet hole the size of a quarter in our ceiling! A bullet had come down through our ceiling! We called the police. We started looking around for where the bullet went and we saw that the bullet lodged itself in the cushion in the wicker chair upon which Elder Read had been sitting 30 second prior. We looked at where the bullet hole was and how Elder Read was sitting in the chair and realized that he would have been shot right in his heart if he had been sitting there. We called President McConkie and informed him - he told us that we would be moving very soon, during which we had a knock at the door. We were too scared to open the door when we saw that it was our neighbor from upstairs. We figured we would let the cops deal with it. After about 15 minutes the cops came and talked to the neighbor upstairs and then came downstairs. They told us that our neighbor said that he had just bought the gun that day and was cleaning it when a shell became lodged in the chamber, when he tried to dislodge the round the gun shot. They cops had never heard of something like that and told us that he was probably fooling around with the gun. The police found the bullet and showed us. They told us that it was a lot bigger round than they even use, and estimated that it was a 45 caliber bullet. THATS PRETTY BIG! Soooooo, we had to move. We spend a lot of Thursday looking for a new place to stay, then we reported back to the housing coordinator and she arranged a lease agreement with the land lord. Friday we spent most of the day at Zone conference. Saturday we moved all day into our new apartment. Sunday we had a really cool guy at church- I feel really blessed He had been wanting to check out our church for a while and he just decided to show up on our first Sunday in Sumter. We will be teaching him again soon. Sunday night was really stormy, and we were out on our bikes. On the way home I was going across some rail road tracks which made a "Y" with the road so I went over them at a weird angle. It was dark and the tracks were wet and my front bike tire caught on the gap between the road and the rail. My bike went to my left and I kept going straight, my bike just came out from under me and landed pretty hard. I got scraped up a good bit on my hands knees and elbows and I am bruised, but other than that I am ok. When I got up this morning I thought of Grandpa Smith, my knees are killing me. I can't kneel on them because they are bruised and scraped up (don't worry, I cleaned them with hydrogen peroxide), and both of my knees were really stiff- it hurts to just walk! One of the lights on my bike broke, but other than that I think my bike is ok. My brown paints are destroyed, but I think I can survive with out them for now. I didn't really like those pants anyway. My watch wrist band broke, but luckily Elder Haslem is a watch expert. He told me that I just need a $3 metal pin to fix it from the watch section at Walmart. I hope I can get it fixed today.
So all in all it was a really eventful week - Companion had a bike accident, transferes to Sumter, bullet comes through our ceiling during a prayer (kind of reminded me of the story of the Anti-Nephi-Lehi s), Zone conference- some one's car window was broken by a bike rack, moving again, and I crash on my bike.
Sorry I didn't have time to proof read this!
Love,
Elder Smith
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