Family,
Well another good week gone by. Thanks for the emails, although I didn't get one from Dad, I will just blame it on an evil oven mit. Sounds like things are going well back home. Hmm.... Where to begin.... Not much really happened this week that was to much out of the ordinary. This week immigration has been out in full force chasing everyone around, so that has been sort of crazy. Funny story about immigration, It all started on Wednesday. I was on splits and I was teaching some lady named Imacula with Ruben helping me out. And then someone said that immigration was coming, so all the Haitians ran. Ruben, he is illegal, and so he left and Imacula, she is illegal, she left and so I just went outside and figured I would just sit there and wait it all out as normal. Well then out of no where Michala Chalas (the 6 year old daugther) started freaking out and yelling at me to get inside because immigration was coming and she was very worried that immigration was going to get me or some member of her family (her entire family is legal residents) so I went inside and just hung out with the Chalas family until everything outside calmed down. I don't know why I found it so funny. Something about Michala freaking out about immigration when no one was in any danger made me laugh. Immigration would never give me any problems because of my skin color, they don't talk to lighter skinned people, even if I was illegal I would be just fine, I look too much like a tourist.
On a similar note of immigration they have banned taxis. So now no one can get anywhere. I am sort of baffled at this. The economy is terrible here and they just destroyed 200 jobs by getting rid of the taxis and those that do have work can't get to work because they don't have a way to get to work. Well this makes it really annoying to get anywhere for us too. We live an hour away from the church (walking) and so now without our bikes which have been retired, and without a car we just get to walk. Good exercise, but really annoying. Church attendence was really bad yesterday because no one could get to church without the taxis. I can't understand the logic behind the no taxi thing, I don't even see how it will help them catch all the illegal Haitians, it seems more like it is just going to annoy every person on this island, many of the legal people on the island taxi everywhere. And when school starts at the end of the month a vast majority of the students taxi to school and now there is no taxi.... I sort of expect all the taxis to return in a week or so after everyone complains about it.
The Ockeys visited this weekend so that was fun, it is always fun when they come visit. Pres. Ockey gave us some new training and we had some good dinners. A nice visit. Well on a similar note of food, the Chalas family grandmother runs like a shop thingy where people come and buy stuff. Everyday Sister Chalas when she comes back from work always brings a pickup truck full of stuff to fill the shop with, and everyday I get left with the job of carrying all the food inside the shop, but I don't really mind. Anyways, Sister Chalas is a cook for one of the restaurants and always brings home pizza everyday that she just gets from work and this week after I finish carrying all their groceries they give me some pizza, so that has been good, it is nice pizza, I like it.
Hmm...somehow I ran out of time unusually fast today, that was weird, I got distracted from a conversation going on, oh well. My eyes have still been having this really weird problem where when I put in my contacts 2 days later my eyes are flaming red and then I wear my glasses until the red leaves a few days later then I do it again. I have tried everything to solve this problem and nothing works. Well I had started to wonder if maybe it is just that my eyes have changed and so my prescription isn't for my eyes and so my contacts have been irritating my eyes. anyways, I tried one last thing this week of just buying new solution. It worked just fine, I haven't had the problem since then. Which is really weird because I have been using the same brand of solution for quite some time and the problem didn't develop until about 2 months ago. Weird, but problem solved for now...if it comes back again I will probably just resort to wearing my glasses until the end of my mission and worry about it when I get home.
The work is going good. We don't really have much of great investigators. Immigration picked up some of our better investigators, so that was unfortunate. We have this one Jamaican we have been teaching who is really cool, but she works on Sundays very often so it is hard for her to come to church. It is always fun to teach Jamaicans, they are always surprised by our knowledge of Jamaica and I just love the culture of the Jamaican people. Ruben is an all star, he has been out trying to find new people for us to teach. I want to try and work with his father this week. His father was against him getting baptized, and hasn't really been interested, but this week his heart has softened quite a bit from some random things that have happened and I have been trying to help him out as often as I can through service and what not and I think he is about ready to sit down and actually listen to our message.
Life is great here, I am doing excellent. My health is great, the work is progressing quite well. The Chalas family is awesome, I have been working on them for a while with tithing and yesterday they finally payed tithing for the first time ever!!! So that was really exciting, Miguel said that he is going to put the yellow slip in his journal to remember the first time his family payed tithing. They were really excited to pay it too haha it was great, I was so proud of them! I am out of time, but things are good. I hope that this next week is great for all of you, I will make sure to get some good pictures next week. Thanks for the emails again, good luck, keep being awesome!
Love
Elder B. Kent Talbert
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