Hello family!It was nice to hear from all of you. tell anyone if they want to contact me to email me. that is how they want us to talk to people. also I can get pictures on here so send them!!! I will send pics in another email. ps its hard to take pictures in really poor areas, because you dont want people to know you have a cameraI am In Mpumudde. which is the armpit of the world... honestly you have no idea how poor it is here...Let me walk you through a day here. Everything i say is true stories.I was up and 6:30 and climb out of my mosquito net, and still have bites everywhere. usually I would have Malaria by now but I take my pills everyday! hopefully I dont forget to take them!!! I immediately get out of bed and put on my shoes.( i where shoes 24/7 because the floors are so dirty and unsanitary and have bugs everywhere.I then go on a jog in the morning and follow a dirt path around a village of mud huts. as Im running I see so many stray dogs and goats and chickens and cows and turkeys, and see a ton of dead animals on the side of the road. I get home to my little little home with barred windows and sheet metal doors with locks on everything!!!
I then shower in a corner of the bathroom. the water is brown and cold. then I study alone and then with elder Lloyd, who is my father and is super legit! then we eat lunch if we have food and go out to teach at about 1:00. we walk around through sugar cane fields and between mud huts and villages until we get to an appointment. On the way I can see hundreds of naked kids running around bare foot on sharp rocks and poop.... they run up to us and scream Mazungoo! (which means white person) and they grab our arms and pick up their feet. they are so happy, but so dirty. ofter they make my arms turn black... I see 1 year olds running around with knives or a dead chicken in there hands. I see babies(as in 30 at a time) all laying on the dirt while their sister or brother is sweeping the dirt outside their hut... There are piles of trash burning eveywhere. I get scents of burning trash, dead animals, and rotten meat everywhere. Everyone is looking at us eveywhere we go. at every corner people are trying to sell you things. Man the fruit here is awesome! I love Jackfruit or fenne! please google it.
I met a women named mama Ieda. She recently got all the flesh burnt off the lower half of her body... she wouldnt died if it wouldnt have been for a senior couple that paid out of their pocket for surgery... her legs look like strips of yellow beef jerky... even though she can barely move she shuffles around trying to earn money and hasnt once complained or cried out in pain... (haha imagine how an american would act! It would be embarrassing) I taught my first lesson to a family of 4 that lost their mother to Malaria, in a mud hut in the dark with a small candle type thing in the corner that we used for light.... we say goodnight and say a prayer and walk out of their hole in the mud to see a group of "enyabos" (men) completely drunk. They are blasting us in their native tongue and we just run off... Old JaJa's (old women) are breast feeding multiple children at a time. It's disgusting... One of the awesome things is that we walk through a swamp eveynight and there are thousands and thousands of FIREFLIES! I've never seen them before so it is awesome to stop and hear the frogs, crickets, and to see the fireflies. It is better than a movie!!! The whole day I am Sweating... It is so hot and so Humid here... I am sweating from my insides and am soaked! We go home and walk through our metal gate with 2 locks on the inside and we always have a guard there provided by the church, but he is always trying to run his business of fried dough... we then go inside and close the day as a companionship and make dinner... Oh man how I miss food!!! Every night we basically have potatoes and rice and beans.... and we have warm water... We have a filter that we use for everything!! Brushing teeth, dishes, and anything else that will be in our mouth... I am exhausted from the day or sweating, walking, teaching, cleaning, making dinner, and just living!!! I usually fall asleep on a old chair in the corned.. dinner takes forever to make because our sources of heat suck!!! we didnt go to bed until 12 last night!!! I brush my teeth, write in my journal, look at my pictures, and say a prayer and then I climb back into my mosquito net and go to sleep... that's the condensed version of my day.One Cool story is... Elder Lloyd and I were walking down a road and passed a huge chicken and kept walking, but then we thought we should go buy it for dinner. so we went back and a lady named Mary said," you come to my house and pray for me." so we followed her to her house. We asked her why she needed prayers... she told us her husband died from TB a while ago and three days after his death she had a dream. She said in the dream she saw her husband walking... he approached 2 gates. One of the gates has a huge white gate that was very smart. (smart means beautiful) and it had a "straight and narrow path" leading to it. (those were her exact words! straight and narrow... how crazy) Then she said there was another small red gate that was old at ugly. she said she then watched her husband decide to follow the straight and narrow path into the white gate....
I have been pondering the meaning of this for a long time... I think her husband is accepting
the gospel in the spirit world and needs temple work done here on earth! Wow so many
awesome things could come from this!!! If she is baptized then her husbands name will go to
the temple and then his work will be done!!! The spirit totally lead us to her and now we are
teaching her and she came to church yesterday! totally solid lady! I will let you know how it
goes!
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