Another Week in Mahazoarivo!!

Letter from Feb 3, 2014

Another Week come and gone. It was a pretty fast week!

If you want to be jealous, go visit elderchancefox.blogspot.com. He is currently working in Fort Dauphin, and is in my group, just look at those pictures. We here, are all so jealous of them working down there. Not saying that Antsirabe is not pretty, but it aint no Fort D.

Yesterday was a wonderful day at church. In Tana there is this one member who is deaf, he came down yesterday to visit, and so I ended up translating for him in Teny Jules. He name is Jules and he made up the sign language, which is at some times a little similar to ASL, but not really at all. It was a lot of fun, but it was really hard to do. He is such a cool guy!! He is just absolutely amazing. I hope to have a chance to see him and chat with him some more before the end of my mission. We shall see. 

This week, I also met an american!! It was way cool. We were at the bank getting money out, and there was this girl waiting in line, and I was judging if she was french or american. I figured she might be american so I decided to chat with her to see. Normally I dont talk to white people in this country. She was american!! Not only American, but is here with the Peace Corps. She is from OHIO!! She is from Cinci, but went to school at Ohio State. She got a degree in International relations. She also said her sister lived in Dublin for a while, and she asked if I knew where Flanagans Dublin was. I was like, yeah, about 3 minutes from my house. So that was cool. She is here teaching English for two years.

Besides that, it was a good week of teaching investigators and helping people increase their faith. We had 20 investigators at church yesterday, and hopefully have like 10 baptisms coming up in March, so the work is still progressing. 

A cool story. We have some investigators that have been investigating for 5 years now. They have been having a huge problem getting a divorce and then married. This has been a problem for them for a long time, but it looks as if we should be getting close to having that all solved and they should be able to be baptized. They are practically members, they know everything, are way diligent, the problem has just been the soratra problems. 

Members here are absolutely wonderful, and I love working with them. My branch has a goal for 180 people at church by the end of June, and yesterday we had 163, which is a lot more than we normally have. We are really looking forward to watching this branch grow and eventually split, and then eventually split again, and so forth. The work is going, sometimes we feel it should be going faster than it is, but when you take a step back and look in the terms of growth over years, it is booming. If I am not mistaking, the first branch was organized in 2004. or sometime around there. Now in 2014 we have 8 branches that are part of the Antsirabe district, and they have submitted paperwork to become a stake. So looking at it like that, the work is definatly progressing, we just need to make it progress it a little more. So it feels like it goes slow, but thats because we only see such a small part, over such a small time frame, so its hard to see it in the fullness. But all things need time, and this branch is hitting its stride. This branch runs like the way it should, and so its just time before it really just takes off and hits a whole new level of awesome!!

Life is great! Life is wonderful! The work is great! The Lord is Great!

Elder Weber