Welcome to the South, The Deep South!

Well everyone i made it to South Carolina. After 6 hours worth of flights and after spending all day in the airport last monday i made it. Anyway last monday and tuesday we stayed at the mission home in columbia with president and sister mckonkie. They are awesome by the way, he is really strict though. On Wednsday we were put with our trainers and assigned an area. So drumroll please......................we are in Elgin South Carolina. Its about as country as it gets here. Its about 105 degrees everyday and at least 90% humidity. oh ya and its also the biggest biking area in the mission! yep thats right i got put in the biggest biking mission for my first area! and at the hottest time of the year! its at least 2 miles into town on our bikes and its mostly uphill. i will have to send photos soon of what it looks like here. Everywhere you look there are trees. There isnt a clear area anywhere you look haha i feel claustraphobic. Since we started biking i have lost about 10 pounds in the 5 days. This is a really tough area too. There are only 300 members in the town and only 120 of them are active in the church. My companion, Elder Mcmurrey, hasnt every been to this area either so its called white washing when they bring two new elders in to take over the area. The last set of missionaries here didnt really do their job, we have no investigators to teach so we have been riding our bikes 15 to 20 miles a day knocking on doors trying to find someone who will let us teach them. The members here are great though! The bishop here has only been a member for 10 years! Most of the members are converts and they havent been the in church too long. We have had some experiences the last few days that have been kinda bad. We have to ride our bikes down the highway every morning to get into town and on friday we had someone throw a bucket of water at us to try to knock us off our bikes, and then the next day someone did the same thing again but this time with ice. There are alot of misconceptions about the church here and we are doing our best to clear them up. We have a couple in the ward who is inactive that we were supposed to see this week but they called us on friday and told us that we couldnt meet because their 2 year old little girl had gone missing. We found out that the little girl had drowned in one of the rivers near Elgin on Saturday so that was really really sad. The couple is only about 25 or 26 and they were really making an effort to become active in the church. They are going to let us come visit them this week because they want to talk with us. So overall its been a very trying week. We have alot of people here who will say some very mean things and slam the door in your face. The only thing you can do is shake it off and go to the next door. I hope we will be able to find new investigators to teach and baptize but its going to take alot of hard work. And if anyone wants to write me a letter or send a package everything has to go through the mission home address, which my mom should have. And all packages have to be through USPS because fedex and ups wont forward mail. Hopefully i will have some better news next week! I love you all!