Week 39

Yo!

Bikes, trains, buses. That's our order of preference for transportation
in the gorgeous (dirty) city of Buffalo. I would say that anyone of
these emails I send in my time in Buffalo could be my last, because I
swear, one of these days I am going to clip my handlebars on a parked
car's mirror on a busy street and then proceed to get run over by a
car. That wouldn't be an unlikely scenario, I've almost done it 20
times already. It makes for a good time though! Missionary work on the
edge. For reals though, some roads are crazy skinny and theres no
space between the passing cars and the parked cars, and it doesn't help
that insane people still try to pass. I'm actually pretty comfortable
with it by now, but my first day here I was fairly confident that I
was gonna die.

Anyway, I love the city! Completely different from anything I've
experienced in my mission so far. Our apartment is right in the middle
of it, and there are people everywhere and it's just a good time. We
ride around town all day visiting people. People will call us out to
talk to us every now and then. Everyone in the city is pretty nice so
far. Some people know us as the "Jesus people" which is kinda cool
haha. As for our investigators here, so far I haven't taught a single
lesson to people that understand what I'm saying. That's not because we
teach Spanish people, it's because our main pool of investigators are
all Burmese. We have 3 Burmese families we teach, and before we would
go to teach them my companion would always say "they know some
 English, and can understand what we say". No they don't. Our lessons
usually involve us saying the simplest sentences of doctrine we can
while still attempting to cover everything, and then in each house
there is a young teenager who knows more English than anyone else
because they go to school, so they translate (kind of) what we say to
the rest of the family. If they don't understand, we just get a bunch
of blank stares (which is most of the time), and we have to reword
what we just said. It's a little confusing because for each state or
section in Burma there is a different language for it. Two
of our families speak Carenni, and the other family speaks Caren,
which are apparently very different. The other Burmese people they
taught before I got here spoke a different version than those two.
Anyway, they don't have a Book of Mormon in the national language of
Burmese, much less all the different off shoots, but they do make the
lesson pamphlets in Burmese, which is really our only shot.  The
problem with that, is that Burmese is the national language that no
one uses and is only taught in certain schools, and the only people
that know it are the older generation. So pretty much the parents know
it, but not the kids, so when we do get the pamphlets the parents will
have to read them in Burmese and the kids are still going to end up with
a translated version of what's in there because they have to translate
it into Caren or Carenni. Oh, and we just found really cool potential
investigators today. They are French speaking Congans, and only the
mom knows English haha. We teach completely differently than how I've
taught my whole mission, but it's a lot of fun.

I'll end my email there. Maybe next week I'll talk about our
adventures in the really sketchy parts of town haha. Alright cya!

 Love, Elder Holt