Baptisms, Personal Chef & Rubber Boots

So life here is interesting as always!  The branch I'm in right now- the Kossoh Town branch, just split with another town called Grafton and right now they're in the process of figuring out leadership for the whole branch. So the missionaries are helping a lot. The crazy thing about the Church here is that the only people who are members that aren't converts are kids under the age of 5. The very vast majority of adults haven't been members for more than a couple of years. The growth here is so fast though! It's sweet. I'll say more on that in a bit. But for example the branch president has only been a member for 2 years. Talk about responsibility! He is a really really cool guy though. And he speaks good English which is nice. With all the new converts to the ward there are a lot of questions about little things of doctrine. I think I remember Dad telling a story about something similar to this on his mission, but like this past Sunday in Sunday school there was a big discussion about whether or not women can touch the sacrament trays to pass it down the row. I think in the end we straightened it out and they understood that it was not a problem in any way. But I"m not 100% sure because the whole conversation was in Krio and I still just get bits and pieces of conversation. I think Elder Pabie, my companion set it straight.

Anyway, back to the subject of fast growth, we had a baptismal service this weekend! Let's see, I've been out in my actual mission for how long? A week and a half? This weekend we had 5 baptisms. Yup. I baptized all the people (as you can see in the picture) and it was really cool! And before anyone asks, no none of them had crazy names that were hard to pronounce. On Sunday we split up the confirmations between people and I got to confirm one of them. It was really cool! So needless to say the Church is growing very fast in this area! We already have about 4 more people planned for baptism in the next couple of weeks. It's so crazy.

Before I go on anymore in this email though I just need to take a moment and thank everyone who has been sending me mail! Last Tuesday I got home from proselyting to see about 8 or 9 letters sitting on top of that package from Grandma. I think 4 of the letters were the ones that got sent to the MTC, but even those old ones were awesome to get! So all my friends back home I want you to know I'm getting your letters and I love all of you so much for it! And with that said I'm sorry to report that it will take a while to respond... We only write letters on Monday and even then we're super busy. Handwashing your clothes takes a good chunk of time by itself... But please feel free to keep sending them! You guys are awesome!

And Grandma/Pattersons thank you so much for the package, I've already eaten about half of the stuff in there! I was SO EXCITED to see normal food. Well, food I've known for the majority of my life. So yeah, food here is pretty much rice with some kind of leaf on it. and not like picked off a tree and dropped on top. like smashed up into this kind of paste goo. It's not too bad actually. But I'm not gonna lie, eating rice every single day for every meal makes you get sick of rice very fast. I'm very blessed to have gotten the companion I got though. He loves to cook. So much that when I tried to cook spaghetti for him he told me he didn't feel comfortable having a grown man cook for him and cooked it for us himself. I have no problems with it. Haha. So yeah, he cooks pretty much every breakfast and night and shares his food with me. I'm so lucky. He's also really good at getting people we teach to cook for us so we usually get offered one or two meals throughout the day. It's pretty nice. Sometimes we have even have problems with too many people cooking for us in a day. We get so full. Haha.

So to answer your questions quickly- no we don't have any running water. Everything is rainwater that we get out of buckets we have set outside. We only have electricity for a few hours every night because we have a generator, but that turns off at lights out every night. We do have toliets. To flush them you take a bucket of water and just pour it in. Manual flush. Haha. We do have a refrigerator, it just only is turned on when the generator is on. So that's when things get charged- which reminds me that adapter Dad sent is perfect. We have a gas stove that we hook up to a propane tank. The heat isn't too awful right now, but yeah it's just because it's rainy season. It's probably somewhere in the 80s most of the time. No idea though. They say March is the hottest month.

Well, I'm just about out of time so I better wrap this up! An idea came to me- I don't know how often Google comes into our area but if you go on google maps and look up Kossoh Town, Jui Junction, Allentown, Kobba Farm, Cashe Farm, and Grafton, you can maybe do a street view and see what my area looks like! All of those towns are within Freetown so maybe you can see them? Anyway, I miss and love you all!

Love,

Elder Hunty

ps- you'll notice that Elder Pabie and I have rubber boots on. The roads in our area get so crazy muddy that it's the only way to keep our feet dry! Also for some reason I look really dorky in the picture on the mountain. Just ignore that and enjoy the sweet view.