TRAINING ALMOST COMPLETE

Hello!! So this email is going to be awesome, so read it!! 

So first things first: I am almost done with my training program!! I am now officially on week 11 out of 12. This is going to be so awesome!! 

Also on that end of things, there was a baptism this last Saturday! This was my first convert baptism in country, and it was really exciting. Her husband is a member and so he did the baptism. She had to be dunked twice because he made a diso (means error) in the words and dunked her before people could fix it! So that was way exciting!

Mom, the article you read is almost guaranteed taken from a talk by Brad Wilcox, it is a wonderful talk and I encourage everyone to watch it, it is life changing and inspiring! We actually watched it in a zone conference back in July. Link here: http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1966 and believe me its better to watch it than read it. And we get the ensigns most months, it just takes a while generally.

This morning we had a Emergency Drill for in case some things happen. We had to take our 72 hours kits to the office and be there by a certain time. If something was going to go down here, we would be all over it. They would either have us meet at the office or at a church building that is way close to the airport and to the US embassy. But yeah... life is good. The reason for the drill was to make sure we all have what we need, and also because Cyclone season is coming up, and last year there were two areas badly affected, and also the "elections" going up at the end of October. Personal opinion, the election is not going to happen until the big guys step in and make it happen. South Africa and other countries are pressuring Mada to do it, but we will see, my bet is that it gets pushed back again. 

Answers to Questions:

What does a normal day look like?

A normal day goes about like this:

6:30 Arise and shine

8:00 Personal Study

9:00 Comp Study

10:00 More Comp Study (only while training)

11:00 Language Study

12:00 Lunch

And then we normally work from 1:00 until 8:00 and then we go home and eat dinner and plan. So what does work for seven hours look like??

Well it really depends on the day. We have meetings and things on certain days, district meetings, DMB meetings, Branch President meetings, things like that. We teach a decent amount of times a week, we are a probably a little low on the number side of things, we teach about 13 times a week. Besides that we do do some porte de porte, or knocking doors, but our area doesn't need a ton of knocking right now which is good! 

Service Projects I have done: Really the main service here for the missionaries is we teach an English class each week. Also I am teaching a piano class for the branch because they asked. Little service projects I have done include moving gravel, moving bricks, painting, little things like that. The gravel really hurt my head. They filled bags of about 40 lbs of gravel and then you put it on your head and carry it to where it is going. It really hurts your neck. The thing is... It was all women that were doing it. These tiny women putting these heavy bags on their head. People laughed at me, because it was more comfortable to carry it with my arms then my head. And we did that wearing Proselyting clothes. That was fun!

So  a little story about investigators for the week. We had a baptism last Saturday, we have two more bap dates and we are hoping to get a family with 5 people eligible for baptism to accept a date soon. It looks like right now there will be two baptisms on my birthday! Also yesterday we talked to this lady who learned before from missionaries and really enjoyed it, but the coup in 2009 interrupted her learning because she is pretty high up in the government, but now she is going to start learning again. We are hoping for big things out of her.

Well I think that is about all for this week! 

Loves.