What is up?

I hope everyone's week was considerably less hectic than this past week in India haha.  On Monday evening, the prime minister of India hit the nation with the most random economic surprise.  Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that 500 and 1000 rupee notes are no longer accepted as legal tender.  He referred to them as "worthless pieces of paper" from now on.  Apparently this is in an effort to fight the "black money" market and eradicate fraud.  The Reserve Bank of India is now printing new 500 and 2000 rupee notes.  But it will take some time to get those in regular circulation, so where does that leave the rest of us?  It leaves us standing in line for three or more hours at banks in hopes to get our "old money" exchanged for smaller notes (i.e. fifty and hundred rupee notes) haha.  In short, the country is in economic distress right now haha.

But one cool thing that happened this week: we were teaching an investigator named Sunil, he is from north India.  He speaks just okay English, so it's been kind of a struggle to determine whether or not he is retaining what he's learning.  This week were talking with him about prophets, and as soon as we mentioned the name Joseph Smith, it was like a light turned on and he went on to tell us, basically, the Joseph Smith story.  We were in awe.  It was kind of funny, when he was describing the miraculous event of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ appearing to Joseph Smith, he said, "They said to him, 'Joseph.  Hello.  How are you?'" Though it was in broken English, the Spirit was very much present as he rehearsed Joseph's experience to us.  Moral of the story is: people are a lot brighter than we often give them credit for.  Have faith in people, because they really can change.

Keep the faith!

Elder Tuscano

P.S.  Sorry for no pictures this week, I forgot to charge my camera.  All week.  But it's charged now, so I'll take some this week and send 'em!