Goose Eggs

Family,
Well sounds like you have all had a very boring week! Haha but oh well, to bad you are still getting snow, we just get rain and more rain and then lots of heat. It is nice most of the time, occasionally it gets a bit hot for comfort. Well I had to get more money yesterday afternoon because on my bike ride to church my chain broke and exploded everywhere. Well at least my bike is slowly getting high quality parts. Just costs more than I would like. I have learned a lot about how every piece of a bike works now. After breaking more or less every part up to this point I have had a lot of time to figure it all out.
This week has been good. We had zone conference which was super good! Wednesday night we went in early and drove to Sav to sleep over. It was a lot of fun. In the morning we had a 4 hour bus ride to the conference. It was lousy. The road was so bumpy and horrible that we could do nothing but sit there, no reading, no sleeping, just head aches. The conference lasted 6 hours, we had an hour long lunch at the end and then returned to Sav for another night of sleep. I will get to the highlights of the conference a bit later.
Well McCloud (our Sabbath day man) has been lost. He just won't overcome that concern of his. He has read the book of mormon and knows everything about it now. But he just refuses to believe that the Sabbath could be anything other than Saturday. It was really dumb, and frustrating. We tried for a few days but finally decided it wasn't going anywhere, he just didn't want to change, the false doctrines have won again!
We have gotten water back into our kitchen, which is wonderful! We had to use the bathroom for all our water needs until yesterday when it was finally restored to the kitchen. We met a man who wanted to talk to us so we went over to him and he asked us if we were mormons, we answered yes he than said "so that means you just do good?" we answered again in the affirmative, he then proceeded to ask us for money because good people would give away their money. Well we asked him if he was a good person and he told us he was so we asked him for his money and in the end we gave him $100 and he gave us $100 it was really dumb yet made me laugh that he went through with it.
Church was good yesterday. My talk still came out moderately short but oh well. We still managed to fill up all the time. I still have the problem of speed talking. Well we have one good investigator named Mosely! Mosely is an elderly man with bad knees who happens to be super humble. It is great! He does all his reading, understands everything and has a testimony growing. We invited him to church and he came, it just so happens that he is related to about half of our branch! So he had excellent fellowshipping! We are hoping that things continue to go well with him! We have been teaching him with one of his cousins, Bro. Allen who is a member of the branch. Bro. Allen is probably one of my favorite members. He has more or less built the entire branch himself. One of the first to be baptized in Negril he has managed to get a lot of his relatives to join so most the branch is baptized because of him, he has done wonders for the branch and is really good at teaching, he is just so blunt about everything he says.
I have been thinking about other religions in the area and one of the most prominent beliefs is that when you get the holy ghost you are taken over! You fall to the ground and have some strange seizure like thing and you make a bunch of weird noise from you mouth. It is really dumb to see, when we visited the Pentecostal church the girl next to us got into the "spirt". Well I was thinking about that and if Christ promised this great gift of the Holy Ghost wouldn't you want to have it always? From what they believe I think it would be a problem if you got the spirt while driving, swimming, standing near a cliff, etc. That seems like an instant indication that there is a problem with their doctrine. They don't always want their version of the Holy Ghost with them, it could be deadly.
Well at zone conference sister Gingery and president gingery both spoke. First off President Gingery told us of his plans to run and hide in the mountains and live as a mountain missionary for the rest of his life, he doesn't want to leave Jamaica. But Sister Gingery did give an excellent lesson about serving god. She compared it to a football game. That in the Game of football you are facing the way you want to run and you run that direction attempting to score a goal. If the whole team was facing the wrong way it is going to be near impossible to win. We have to be facing towards god and trying to get to him, not just standing around. We can't face the world and still expect to make it to god. Our goals have to be towards God.
Well Heather I don't think my voice has really changed and I look mostly the same, my skin is a lot darker from being in the sun for 11 hours a day. We never have lessons inside peoples homes, always outside so from the moment we leave home we will be outside till we go home. Other than that not much has changed. My hair is still more or less the same because our barber worked on a cruise ship and learned how to cut white people hair. Most the barbers don't know how and make really weird haircuts for white people that look odd. So some of the missionaries have strange hair cuts but I got lucky.
On Saturday we met a man named Shola oyename he is from Nigeria. An elderly man and 100% blind. He is awesome! Have taught him a few times and all is going well. He likes to learn and has a strong desire to know about Joseph Smith and if he is a true prophet. The hardest part is his blindness. It is hard to leave him with many commitments since he can't see. But he is a really good man.
Well all goes well in Jamaica. I am enjoying myself. I am getting tired of the music here. All they listen to is Gospel Music and Dance Hall. Dance hall is just like retarded Rap music. And you hear it everywhere you go. Out side you will pass houses that have about 20-30 giant speakers playing music as loud as possible. You can hear dance hall music all day blasting on the streets. When we ride past you can't even hear yourself speak. It is really annoying to listen to this music. It is so poorly made. Anyone can make dance hall music and so everyone does and then they listen to it really loud.
Well I am running out of things to say! I haven't had all that much happen this week. I have been trying to make sure and write good journal entries so that I can remember everything for when I get home but since I don't carry my journal with me only the highlights stick out to me during email time. Robbie seems to be doing good. Sounds like transfers were good for him! So I was glad to hear that! Joseph I don't know if I have a good cube anymore for that. Are you using a color reader or a grayscale reader? Either way I think I changed most my cubes so they probably won't work. I don't know.
Church is good. We had 16 people their yesterday. Which is sort of pathetic! Haha in the Turks islands the church has only been their for about 3 months and they already have over 60 people attending church. The weird part about the turks is the ratio of men to women. In most of Jamaica it is almost all women with a handful of men. But in the turks they had 6 women at church last week and over 50 males. So it is really odd. Lots of priesthood in the branch which is good! This mission needs more priesthood holders! It is what is holding us back from forming a stake!
I am wasting a lot of time just staring at the screen here trying to figure out what to say but not much is coming to my mind. I will probably buy a new pair of scriptures just before I come home. My scriptures have already taken a good amount of use, after another 21 months they are going to be fairly damaged. But oh well, at least they will be well used by that point. Well luckily we went to another grocery store the other night because E. Stevens ran out of food and we found that they had multiple flavors of Ramen! So now we don't have to fret starving or getting bored of our ramen. We have added some variety to our life! So that is going well! Sister Gingery made the missionaries a super good dessert for zone conference so that was awesome! We got to eat some thing that was very tasty! Odd thing about Jamaicans is they don't like chocolate at all. They think it is gross. It is really weird.
I wish I had something interesting that I studied recently that I could share but nothing amazing. I have been reading through Jesus the chirst. That is a really good book! Tons of great info about Christ's life. I have enjoyed that book and find it interesting to read. Well I read through the parable in Matthew 25 about the Talents. I was thinking about it and callings in the church. In Jamaica there is a power hungry issue in the church. Lots of pride. But in parable all the master expects of his servants is to use what they are given. One person was given a lot so he had a lot of work to do, another not so much. But in the end they got the same reward. It doesn't matter what your calling is: Propeht, Bishop, Primary Teacher, Sunday school teacher, just as long as you magnify that calling you will receive the same reward.
I am running short on time, hopefully next week I will have a bit more to say! Haha well I hope all goes well and that the end of the school year is going great! Congratulations laura on your ACT score. Keep tyring you can still increase you score! Good luck with the snow and glad to hear that my dog is doing well!
I love you all, keep up the good work!
-Elder Kent Talbert