Take the Chicken!

Hey family!

Everything is going pretty sweet, as always. It's got to be getting pretty boring to hear me say that every week but it's true! The good news of the week is that I got the tie and wedding announcement! I wore the tie to church last Sunday. I stuck out quite a bit wearing such a nice flashy tie, but it's all good. When you dress up really nice people here call it "bluffing." So a lot of people at church were like "Ayyy elda stewat! Yu de bluffo!" Yeah. Anyway, I dig the tie and will be wearing it to the Zone Conference we have this Thursday. Elder Richards will wear the pink one. We'll look pretty sweet. Gotta say I loved the pickle story. Man that kid is funny.

Anyway, you were asking for a cool Africa story so here's something pretty exciting that happened. It's not very spiritual but it's pretty funny. Just try and picture it in your head. So a few days ago my companion and I decided we wanted to go and buy some chicken to fry at the market. Now, you need to be reminded that going to the market and buying chicken is very different from driving to wal mart and going to the frozen food section. Basically the place that we buy chicken.. it's like a really big warehouse filled with a HUGE amount of people with lots of tables with fish and chicken on top of them. It stinks like fish and there's flies and dirt and all that nice stuff everywhere. People are shouting and the area to walk is so skinny you're just brushing against people trying to get to the place you want to go. There's little kids weaving between you trying to sell plastic bags and other random objects on their head. Anyway, we made our way to a lady selling chicken and told her we wanted 4 legs. Four legs costs 10000 leones and we said that before she began to cut them. There's no like official prices of anything so you kind of have to talk all of it and negotiate a price to get it. People always try to charge us missionaries ridiculous amounts for things because they think we have lots of money. We usually have to always talk plenty to be able to get it down to the right price. Anyway, we had already settled on the price with this lady and she started putting everything into a bag. When we went to pay she saw we were only giving her 10000 and said that we were supposed to pay 14000 for everything. We told her that wasn't right and said we knew the price and wouldn't take it if she wouldn't give it to us for that price (this happens like every day) she refused to bring it down so we just told her we wouldn't take it. I guess she really didn't like that so she started yelling at us and saying we had to pay for it because she had already put it in the bag or something. A lot of people started staring and it was making a big commotion so we started to just walk away and leave it. About 10 seconds after walking away we heard a scream and turned and saw the lady SCREAMING and running after us shouting "TAKE THE CHICKEN, TAKE THE CHICKEN" (this part doesn't happen every day) We walked out of the place and the lady kept yelling and was trying to grab us and force us to pay for them. By now we had gotten onto the main street and the lady was standing in front of us yelling and shouting and refusing to let us pass. Being a white guy in Africa makes me stick out a little bit so when everyone saw something going on literally 50 people came out of nowhere and surrounded us. The lady was going CRAZY and shouting and saying we're terrible people and everyone around was saying they wanted to settle the dispute. Some guy told us we were rich so we should just pay the lady the amount. We said no (if we took it then everyone would rip us off and we'd have no money... they all think we get paid to do missionary work.). People flipped out. We finally managed to push our way out of the crowd and just walked away. I don't know what the big ordeal was about but it was kind of exciting. But we had no chicken. So the next day we sent some other missionaries and they got it no problem. Anyway, I guess you kind of had to be there but it was pretty crazy. Anyway, I'm out of time. Love you all!

Love,
Elder Stewart