Farsi is coming along great, and He has people to teach!!!!

Well like last week I will just put in Dallin's email. It sounds like things are going well so far, please continue to keep Elder Page in your prayers.

Hey Family,
Well, the first week here in Irvine has been a good one and it has been quite different
from my previous 3 months in Placentia. For one we have almost 20 investigators which is
a huge switch from the humble 4(?) that we had in placentia. And we are on bikes which I
kind of actually enjoy. It hasn't been too hot here since we are pretty close to the
coast and i kind of appreciate the extra excersize.
Elder Cunningham is a great missionary and a really hard worker so I think that we are
going to do fine together over the many coming months that we will spend working
together.
Three days a week we teach a free english class at the church for anyone that wants to
come and a few of our students are persian so that gives us an oppurtunity to use the
little Farsi that we have learned. Speaking of Farsi, since the language is so difficult
to learn we try to study as much as we can every day which usually ends up being
somewhere around 3-4 hours depending on how many other appointments we have to go to. Our
studies right now basically consist of listening to these CD's that Andrew Ainsworth got
for us that teach us basic conversation and also we study the alphabet alot and practice
recognizing letters in words. (Andrew Ainsworth is the man that is helping us learn
Farsi--the funny thing is that he is an American who has only been studying it for maybe
3 months so he's not even that far ahead of us and by no means fluent but he is a great
guy and is helping us alot). Anyways, about the alphabet...it is completely seperate from
our alphabet of course and it consists of 32 letters with about 4 different ways to
rights each one depending on if it is standing alone or whether it falls at the
begginning, middle, or end of the word so you could say there are over 100 letter! Farsi
is written from right to left and is basically like cursive where all the letters run
together in one flowing movement and the biggest catch of them all is that they don't
even include the vowels in the words when writing unless there is a long "a" as
is the word father, then the letter "alef" is used. Anyways, so it is all kind
of complicated but I will send you some stuff that we have in Farsi script so that you
can see it for yourself. But amazingly enough we have already gotten to the point where
if we try we can sound out words pretty accurately about 75% of the time which isn't too
bad and we can even right our names. Not bad, huh!? Anyways, we still have a LONG ways to
go we're trying to make it a fun experience. Well, I will talk to you next week. I love
you guys. Please keep us in your prayers, even though i know that you do. :)
Elder Page