Family,
Well first off I got a new email address. Our mission finally upgraded to the better email system. My new address is bradford.talbert@myldsmail.net the new system is by google and looks like gmail...only less haha it is much better than the last one. I now have a mailbox with 8gb instead of 50mb so that is good. The week has been good, unfortunately it has been very repetitive and so this is going to be a struggle to think of things to write.
Yesterday at church was our first branch presidency meeting, it was funny, none of us knew what in the world was supposed to be discussed and no one had prepared an agenda so it was fairly scatter brained, but we learned a lot and will have a lot more effective meeting next week. The Branch is doing good. we got everyone a calling and have begun on the records. Elder Tonks and I have also been going around visiting with all the members. we have been using the members to try and find new investigators and help the less active ones get back to church. Hmmm....well that is about all I have to say about that.
On Tuesday last week we went on a tradeoff with the Junction Elders. It went very well. The best part was after it was all over Elder tonks and I were driving back to Santa Cruz and we came to a fork in the road and didn't know which way to take, so we guessed and after about 5 minutes we had left all civilization and we were driving through the jungle. so we weren't sure if we should turn around or just keep driving. we chose to keep driving. after about another 15 minutes we exited the jungle and entered santa cruz. turns out it was a much faster path between junction and santa cruz that we had found. it was a lot of fun just driving out in the middle of nowhere hoping that it would exit somewhere we knew, we kept joking that it would be great if it exited in santa cruz, and then it did.
Teaching was pretty difficult this week. Monday was p-day, tuesday we were in junction, wednesday was a holiday and so no one in santa cruz wanted to meet with us, and the rest of the week just sort of carried on like that. haha I have never had such a struggle to find someone to teach, we spent about 7 hours on wednesday just street contacting people in random neighborhoods and taught only 2 lessons. It has been a most unique week, I have worked harder than almost any other week and yet had signifigantly less success than that of any previous week in my mission. But oh well, that is just how it goes sometimes, this next week will be a lot better!
On Saturday we went looking for a less active, sis. smith. Well we found her, she was really old and mostly deaf and had a lot of health problems and no way of really getting to church. We helped her in the morning do a bunch of yard work. Towards the end she had us collect some coconuts from a tree in her yard. Interesting thing about Jamaican culture is they eat all fruit very unripe. Bannanas are exceedingly green, coconuts are exceedingly green, oranges are green, etc. They don't let anything ripen. I think it is in part because the more unripe a fruit is the less chance their is that either it will be stolen by someone or they pick it unripe so that it won't fall and get destroyed on the ground. Either way unripe fruit really isn't all that good, but I have gotten quite use to it. Anyways, back to the coconut. We go to get these coconuts off a 20-25 foot tree. Unripe fruit is a pain to get off of trees, it is still very stuck on and so when you are trying to get something 20 feet above you it is an even bigger pain. Eventually we got down a few and brought them over to her. she wanted to give us one to open up. Unripe coconuts (they call them jellies) are fairly terrible tasting. Well I took a sword to the coconut and open it up. it is full of water when it is unripe, after it is ripe it is full of coconut milk. after all the water is gone their is the jelly, it is like coconut fat and is really really gross. unripe coconuts taste nothing like ripe coconuts, they just taste like leaves. sort of like eating pork fat that only tastes like leaves..... haha but oh well. The yard work was nice, the reward not so nice.
I have been reading through the doctirne and covenants during my lunch and dinner times. I have enjoyed it so far. It is interesting to read about all these little problems the church had at the start, especially with who was in charge of who and who was supposed to do what. During my studies I have been reading through the Book of Mormon again and I spent the week at the end of alma. It always impresses me how good of a man Moroni is. He is just an all around good guy.
Well I am going to attach a few photos here. I don't have to compress them anymore because my inbox/sent box can handle it. Oh wait...DAH! I am using the dumb computers again that don't accept things through USB. This weird internet cafe program that this place has running to keep the computer in control has a weird thing that you can't attach external things to the computer..... oh well, I guess I will try again next week.When I plug things in it just does nothing and then pops up telling me it can't use it. well in that case than you can just imagine that pictures were attached. one was of me washing laundry outside, and the other was of a view of St. Elizabeth (parish name) from the top of a mountain that we were driving up.
Hmm...I also noticed that this new email system doesn't have any form of auto correct spelling errors or spell check, so hopefully their aren't to many errors spread abroad through this email.
Haha well the week was good, I am excited for this next week. Time is nearly finished so this is the last paragraph. I hope this next week goes great for everyone, enjoy the weather. I love you all!
Elder Talbert
No comments:
Post a Comment