Family,
The week was very good. I am glad that all is going well Laura with all your different thingys. You got a new general manager? that is to bad, where did Andrew go? Heather, the only article of faith you can find at the circus is obviously the sixth, "we believe in the same organization that existed in the primitave church namely apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangalists and so forth". Sorry, but you won't get any pictures today, this computer has like stickers or something blocking the usb port....inconvienent. The new email is nice, it is more or less gmail, only no fancy features, on the positive side I have a huge mailbox size now, whereas before I had a small useless one.
Well on Wednesday we drove out to Sav and went on a trade off. I was with Elder Huffaker. He is a good man. One of the things we focus on a lot while on trade offs is commiting investigators to baptism. Frequently missionaries wait to long to commit someone so we show up and commit them to baptism. It was quite successful, Elder Huffaker and I commited 3 people for baptism and all of them accepted and still are progressing towards their dates. Also Elder Huffaker happened to have some hair clippers so I got a haircut at night time. I started off by giving it to myself and then elder huffaker finished it, he also did Elder Tonks hair. He took a picture afterwards that might show up in an email of his at some point, so you might want to watch his blog for that. It looks good, it is nice to have short hair again. I think their is still a longish spot on my left side, but oh well. Pres. Graff has a saying that goes a little like this "the only difference between a good hair cut and a bad hair cut is two weeks"
Also while in Sav we had a huge rain storm, probably one of the biggest storms I have ever experienced. Lightning struck every 1-2 seconds and wind was traveling fast. It was a lot of fun, it kept us up all night since it was ridiculously loud. Most roofs in Jamaica are made of concrete covered with zinc. rain pelting on zinc and then echoing into the house is loud and abnoxious.
Our week went well here in Santa Cruz, we had some really good lessons. Saturday was especially effective. We had a good amount of investigators commited for church, 8 or 9 and we were pretty confident that a good amount of them would come. But we were wrong on that one, not a single one came! AH! haha, so we had a great start to the week and then it all just crashed and collapsed. But we are working on it again and plan to have people at church next week. It is weird that we could go to sav and help them do really well and then come back to our own area and just have it go nowhere. We have 3 really good investigators who would all be baptized if they would just get married so that is a hinderance. Things go well on the teaching side, this next week should be really good.
In other news, the Negril Elders have someone scheduled for baptism this saturday, someone who elder stevens and I and later Elder Hillam and I taught. She is the granddaughter of one of the members who lives close to the church and she was just always very stubborn, but she is finally getting baptized! so that was good news.
The branch is doing well. I have now met every single member of the branch except for 6 people. and those 6 we have little or no information on them so it has been very tricky trying to find them. We don't really know where to go to find them. One of the biggest problems in Jamaica that I have found is that addresses don't really exist, in Kingston they do, but everywhere else it is just vague areas. When we ask people where they live we just get an area name and then we have to try and find their home. It would be like asking someone where we live and saying near the Timpanogos hospital and that was all the information you gave them. So it is a pain to find people, especially less actives that no one knows.
Church was good yesterday. Our sunday school teacher, Sis. Osbourne, does an excellent job teaching. She doesn't have much else going for her in life other than church so she just prepares for her lessons. The Branch here has 3 members that if they left the branch would struggle a ton and would be mostly run by missionaries. The Branch President, Pres. Durrant is a really good man and the only priesthood holder for the job. His family lives in the states, I think he would move to the states also if he didn' t feel that the branch needed him so badly, He has been branch president ever since he arrived. Sacrament meeting the missionaries spoke, not elder tonks and I but 2 other missionaries in Santa Cruz, so that was nice.
I should finish the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants this week. I read the Book of Mormon during studies and the Doctrine and Covenants during breakfast, lunch, dinner, night time. It has been really good. I don't remember if I mentioned this before but at Christmas pres. graff gave everyone a gift of a book of mormon. We were to read through it and mark the all the words of christ. he told us that at Easter he will reveal the next part of the study of that copy of the book of mormon. I am pretty much done at this point, 3rd nephi slowed me down a lot, it takes a long time to mark the words of christ in 3rd nephi, for obvious reasons. I had done the same thing at the start of my mission but it was nice to repeat the exercise. The book of mormon is filled with the words of christ.
Hmm....I don't know if I have that much more to say. The place I am sitting in just turned on the AC and it is really nice. Transfers are next week. I don't think I am getting transfered yet, still got one more to go here. As I look through the options for the email it makes me wish I had set up a bunch of filtering systems and auto organization things on my home email account, it is just going to be a huge mess after 2 years of emails just flooding it. It is also odd that at the start of my mission I always felt rushed to email and now I still have 20 minutes left and I feel that I have typed a whole bunch and don't know what else to say.
Today we woke up to no water and no power. that made for a dry morning, not much you can really do with out either of those when it comes to getting ready for the day. But eventually the water all came back and the power came back and all was well again. I bought fake potatos, that was a good idea, I have enjoyed eating mashed potatos, I bought things to make gravey also but everytime I get ready to make gravey it just sounds like to much work, so I just add butter and eat them plain haha. This week I think I will live off lots of rice, it sounds really good right now, and whatever sounds good on preparation day normally ends up being the food for the week.
Well life goes well, I think I will be done just rambling on now haha. This next week should be great, we have a lot of investigators who are ready and just need to actually commit to doing something! I hope that school/work is good this week. I love you all!
Elder Kent Talbert
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