Monday, November 7, 2011

Cooking Crisis, River Baptisms & General Conference (finally!!)

A sweet river where the Grafton Elders do their baptisms

Ello fambo,

Ow una do? Everything is good over here in Africa (I miss you Paris kids). Yes, the weeks are starting to pass by very quickly for me too. And Momma, don't you worry. I'm faithful to my malaria pill addiction and I'm always sure to drink filtered water. Before I say anything though I have to give a huge giant THANK YOU to the Pattersons. Mannnnn what? There was so much good stuff in that package! I also feel like I should thank Grandma and you parents for being such good friends with them, because I definitely didn't do anything. Except be a really adorable baby. But man. I am especially grateful for those homemade chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. Man. People don't understand. It's like eating.. umm... I guess it's like eating whatever each individuals favorite food is. It was stinking delicious. I don't think anyone will ever understand why I was also super excited just to see the plastic bags that they used to keep the contents of the box safe. You see, we're living way out on the edge of Freetown in villages so it's tough to get good quality plastic bags to put garbage in. So those were just as exciting as the food itself. Anyway, thank you very very much. But as far as cooking goes, this is pretty much our current cooking situation (we're in a crisis). We only have electricity from 8-1030 (The colon button doesn't work on this keyboard). Because of some errors we don't have enough money to buy more fuel for the generator so we don't have our fridge hooked up because it sucks so much fuel. We also can barely use our stove because we are running really low on propane and no one has been able to drive out to us to bring us our extra tank. We do have a stove though. I have no idea how it works. I've been trying to get Elder Pabie to teach me how to cook stuff but I'm yet to really learn how to do stuff. I figure I've got about 3 weeks to fix my ways! I have been figuring out some other stuff I can get from the market and make some stuff. Nothing super crazy though.

Yes! I remember Mr. Terry. Everyone wanted to have him as a teacher because they had parties every Friday. Everyone except all the kids in Mrs. Desormeaux's class. Her class was way better! Yeah, I still have pride in my 3rd grade class. Is that bad? Ah well.

So lets see. What is the story for the week? Well, nothing too crazy has been happening. We've been preparing these young kids for baptism this upcoming Saturday. It's really weird actually, all of a sudden all these adults wanted us to teach their young children and nieces and nephews, so this next baptism is all these young people. It's cool though. The sweet thing about it though is that we are baptizing them in a RIVER! I'm so excited! haha. There's a picture of it attached. This place we found is absolutely beautiful. Man so sweet. So the next email will have pictures from the baptism.

The other sweet thing that happened this week was that we got General Conference! Man I totally took it for granted back home. I don't think I've ever gotten as much out of it as I did this time. It's kind of funny how they do it here. The church building also runs on a generator so we hooked up a TV and a DVD player and put it on top of a file cabinet. Then everyone came into the chapel and we just sat in the pews and watched the Sunday morning session, and then the first half of the afternoon session. So church was still three hours. I wanted to see all of them though. It's okay though. I still got a TON out of it. The gospel is so true. I filled my planner with notes from it all and have read over them a few times since. Needless to say, I will never take General Conference for granted again! I still think I'm okay being at home and watching it on TV in my pajamas though. Does that mean I'm a bad missionary? Ah well.

The final story for this email- I was just thinking this morning how we haven't had any run ins with juju people in a while. Well, on our way over here our poda poda (big vans with rows of benches inside that we use to get around to far off towns) was stopped so this giant crowd of about 50 juju people could beat their drums and dance around a debul that looked like a tan turtle in the middle of the major road. It was pretty annoying. It was really hot inside that van. They cram people in there like sardines. I wanted to go. Okay it was pretty entertaining.

So that's about all I have to say for this time. I love you all and it's good to hear everyone is doing well. I'll talk to you next week!

Love,
Elder Hunty Stuwy



Elder Pabie and I looking super good. Except my face is red (I use sunscreen! Usually...) and we look like our faces are stretched out.
This was a sweet sunrise one morning from our apartment. Sorry if you don't like all the nature pictures. I like nature.
The stinking nice river that we'll be doing our baptisms in next weekend. Man I'm so excited. Haha.
Mom, I found the original blue dog. Okay really I have no idea why this dog was blue. But I felt I should take a picture.

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