Week 41

Sup!

So it was raining a lot this week, which meant we can't really go
riding our bikes around town because whatever pants we decide to wear
will just be ruined. All the dirt and rain kick up from the tires and
just destroy them. So, we were riding buses around.

Buses are fine, except it takes up most of our time to ride a bus to
an appointment, have them not be home, and then go wait for a bus and
catch that somewhere else. Sometimes it just feels like we're on buses
and trains all day long, but that time can be productive if we can get
in conversations with people on the buses. Sometimes its a little hard
to talk to people, because there's a weird social code on buses where
people won't even look at each other. Sometimes people talk, sometimes
people ignore us. Sometimes people will ask what we're "slingin", or
just tell us to teach them "the word", so that's where our good
conversations come from.

We had our lesson with the Key Mey family with the intent
of setting a baptismal date. That went....alright. We started by
reviewing the restoration, having them say what they knew about it and
stuff, and then we re-taught baptism and the importance of baptism
within the gospel, and then invited them to be baptized. I don't know
if I've laid out their family situation, but there is a 17 year old
daughter, a 13 year old son, a 12 year old daugher, and an 8 year old
son, and then the two parents. Everyone wanted to be baptized, but Key
Mey said he had already been baptized.

The problem with Key Mey is that he knows pretty much no english whatsoever,
so we spent time trying to explain the restored authority and how that matters for
baptism, which is touchy enough to do in English, but the problem is
that whatever we were saying was being translated by one of the
daughters, but not exactly very well. A lot was getting lost in
translation and there were a lot of misunderstandings, but eventually
we simply invited Key Mey to pray about it and he agreed, so we'll see
where he is this week. They couldn't make it to church because of some
fathers day thing, but they promised to come next week.

Another thing that happened this week was that we met this really
cool guy named Elmore. We were waiting for someone on the sidewalk of a kind
of busy street, and we saw this jeep flip around down the street and he came
and pulled up right in front of us. He called us over, and he's this big black guy with
a bull ring nose piercing, and then he told us that his best friend was a missionary,
and he started telling us how he was taught back in 1988 and went to the Hill Cumorah
pageant and stuff. He's the nicest guy of all time, and he spent an hour telling us all
these stories, and eventually invited us over for dinner, so we'll go over there this week.

Love,
Elder Holt