Week #15 - The Work is Moving Forward!!

Hey fam,

The week was crazy and kinda rough... I've been pretty sick this week throwing up and stuff.  This does not help with the stink.  It is so bad, but I'm in Africa - I think getting sick is going to be part of the mission.  It sounds like this is pretty normal, not too worried about it. 

We walk about 1 hour to get to our area every day and to get to the city its about 2 hours away.  That is where we have to buy our food.  That is a really long walk or we ride chapas (vans).  They cram people into them.  The food here is good.  it is really hard to buy healthy food because its way expensive.  An apple is like 200 meticais - that's like a whole meal in America. So ya kinda a bummer. 

One crazy thing here is the energy - aka the power. It shuts off like every 20 mintues. In our house we didn't have power last night so we didn't sleep at all because it was so hot!! They put a sort of air conditioner in our apartments for the missionaries.  When the power is out they don't work.  It is way too hot to even sleep.  We all just chilled outside at like 1am.  I sleep on a bed and yes, I have a blanket.

It is a pretty nice apartment -  like a house.  There are lots of bugs though!!!  The sun comes up at like 4am every day. It's been hard for me to sleep.  Especially because I have to wake up during the night to go to the bathroom.  When we went on the South African Flight they gave us covers for your eyes so we could sleep.  I use those and that is nice.  

We had 2 baptisms this week that was pretty awesome. Their names are Joao & Serjeio. The work here is crazy.  People just randomly come up to us on the street and ask us to be taught and sometimes we have to turn them down because we have so many lessons and then we schedule them for like 2 weeks in advance.  We have 10 people for date for baptism so that's pretty cool! 

My companion, Elder Francom is from St George, but his dad was in the military so he has moved around lots.  He is great to work with, I am learning so much from him.  I really like being in a 4 pad, so its nice to talk with the elders.  Crazy, but one of them was with Stephen in the MTC haha.  It was funny how it worked out.  

The Portuguese is still just as hard.  I can't understand anyone at all.  Like I'm not kidding, I hate it . When we teach though I can understand everything so that's nice,

but its the street talk that I cannot understand at all.  This is my greatest desire is to understand the people and to be able to speak to them.  

I will continue to give 110% to the Lord and look forward to seeing the Miracles that God has for these people.  Thanks for your prayers, its been pretty difficult out here.  Like on Sabado, (Sunday) we walked forever and it was blazing outside.  Once nice thing is that I bought a backpack.  It helps a lot with my back.  Everyone here wears them.  Thanks for all you do.

Com amor, 

Elder Rees