Antsirabe!!

I'm going back to Antsirabe! Transfers came in last night, and I am bouncing. Elder Yeagley is getting his mom and I am going to be zone leader in Antsirabe. The weird part is we are going to be doing the second half of the training program with someone who did the first half with his trainer but his trainer is in the branch presidency of manandona so he doesn't really have time to do the program right. So me and Elder Arrieus are finishing his childhood. Not really sure how this is going to work with the missionary terminology/slang but we will figure it out. 

On that note what can I pray for your for this week? 

I don't know, maybe that I don't die of excitement? I am doing great.

How are you feeling?  How is your hand? 

I am feeling good. I don't think this cold will last too much longer. My hand is fine, it was a little tender for a few days but now it is good. 

Eating well?  If the food is expensive suck it up and spend the money.  You can’t have energy to serve if your body is not getting good nutrition.  

I am eating like a king. Full pigs most nights. Definitely not rice beans and instant noodles. That would be terrible. 

Did you hear about transfers?

Yes. See above.

How did the baptisms go? 

They went great! I will write more about them below. 

Am I telling you things you want to hear about?  Anything I am missing?  

Yep. Keep up the good work. Seahawks updates wouldn't be the worst. 

Don’t forget the lawn mowing question.

I don't know, probably like five or ten bucks. 

Please tell me you did not have to use that bathroom.  that is one of my nightmares.  

Just to pee. 

Did you remember your planner this week?

Yep. Not a whole lot got written down this week. Just notes on a bible bash we stumbled into. 

Alright so baptism first. It went awesome! Pics on the bucket. They were so happy. The water was super cold, but it was alright. They both asked me to baptize them too. Man, I haven't been that happy in a long long time. Their baptism just felt so good. Then Marie asked me to give her the gift of the holy Ghost. Man, I have never relied on the spirit so hard in my life. I am not bad at malagasy right, but we don't give a ton of blessings and we definitely don't do it in front of a congregation. Fortunately the power was out so no microphone, and there was only 68 people at church. So that actually sucked. But yeah. It was awesome because they got baptized and confirmed.

Tuesday we had an interesting experience. We are teaching a reactivated guy's son. He isn't baptized (hence our teaching him). So anyway his son is 10 I think, and has a few friends that come and sit in the lesson ranging from 4 to 10. They are quiet and most of them actually listen so it's alright.

So Thursday we went tracting for quite a while and this one guy invited us right in. A little weird, but he seemed interested because he was listening very intently. Then he says, "Do you pray on the Sabbath or on Sunday?" and I was like, well, the bible says the Sabbath is on Sunday so yes? I guess would be the answer to your question. Proceed to slay him about the sabbath day. Then we were trying to explain how God doesn't change so there can only be one true church and we need to try to find said church. He proceeded to explain to me how every apostle started a church and they were all true and that is why there are a lot of churches. Interesting right? So we got out of there pretty quick. 

Yep. Friday we had 13 lessons scheduled for the day. that is almost one every half an hour. Fortunately they were all brand new people that we had tracted into the day before, so six of them weren't there. It worked out well. It does feel kind of nice to have more people than we can actually teach though. 

Anyway, not a whole lot going on other than that. 

Love you a ton, 

Elder Galbreath 5.0 (now with zone leader option)

Last week till transfers

Did you have the baptisms?

Not yet, but P and M passed their interview! This Saturday is the baptism for those two. And they both asked me to baptise them so that will be fun. 

How is the food gong?  Learning to cook anything good?  

I can honestly say most of my meals come out of a box or can.  Soup is my friend.  

Rice. Rice is where it's at. I eat rice and beans legitimately two meals a day six days a week. I am following the word of wisdom's admonition to eat meat sparingly. Not by choice though. Tamatave is just way expensive. 

So lately I have been taking notes on stuff I want to write about throughout the week. It works really well if I remember to take my planner with me on p-day. I haven't remembered that yet. Seems odd right? You use that thing every day but as soon as you put on a t-shirt you forget all about it. So yeah. No promises about how good this email will be. 

Went on a split on Tuesday. That was interesting. So the district leader is in the other area and had to do our baptism interviews. I went over there and he came here with Elder Yeagley. As it happens, Elder Ratsimbarison is training right now. His kid has only been here for four weeks at the time. So not a whole lot of language ability. Doing well for where he is at but he hasn't been here very long. So we went to our first lesson and he did pretty solid, helped teach a lot of it even though it was tithing. So that was a difficult one for him. Then we went to our next lesson. They weren't there. No big deal, we will just go tracting for a while and then go to the next lesson. They weren't there either. Well this sucks, let's do a little more tracting and then go to the next lesson a little early. They are on vacation in Tana. Then we saw the seven o clock lesson family on the street and they told us they couldn't learn because he is leaving town right now. So we literally went tracting all day except one lesson that was about half an hour. Not so terrible since in my area we get a contact about every ten to fifteen minutes that wants to learn. However, Ankirihiry is a whole 'nother ball game. Their area has zero men in it. Since we are trying to build up the leadership and priesthood of the church we have been asked to focus on finding men. So we found one family that was even remotely interested and set up a return appointment. One family. In a full day of tracting. The only up side was Elder Pinson is hilarious. There was this dog giving us flack and Elder Pinson goes "Shut up dog, I will put you in a PETA commercial. Sarah McLachlan's gonna come and start singing. Arms of an angel gonna take you away." I was dying. I couldn't even breathe. So yeah. 

Thursday we had a zone meeting. That was interesting. Talked about some really boring mission stuff you don't understand or care about, just stats and the like. Then we had the lesson. Well, the thing is there are two of us here in Tamatave that are good enough at malagasy and english to be able to translate well. Elder Gaul is one, and I am the other. The problem comes in that Elder Gaul is the zone leader so he gives the lesson at the zone meetings. So I always end up translating. It's not terrific amounts of fun, and I can't take notes on the meeting. But the malagasy elders need to understand what is going on too. So Elder Gaul leads off the lesson with the story of Rip VanWinkle. I know you don't know any other languages enough to translate, but imagine that story and trying to get the message across clearly. It was not easy. Who knows the word for rust? Not me, that's for sure.  So that was interesting, plus my nose is plugged up and keeps draining into my throat and making it hard to breath, let alone talk. I did alright though, the gasy elders understood the point of the lesson. It was based on President Uchtdorf's talk from last conference about "Don't sleep through the restoration". Don't sleep through your mission. It's possible, and very easy. But you won't learn anything and you will hold other people back in the process. It's easy for me to see the extremes,  So yeah. Don't waste your time. If you aren't going to do a mission right then just stay home. Borderline ranting here, moving on. 

So we left the meeting and went to go to lunch. I was hauling on Beast Mode, racing another elder, and destroying him. I turned around to make sure I could still see him, and when I turned back around and was looking forward again, I was very very close behind a sarety. A sarety is a welded steel flatbed with a large handle. Just a big cart, moving slowly and being very very solid. so swerved as best I could but one end of my handlebars caught the handle of the cart. It bruised up my fingers pretty bad on the one hand and almost put me over my handlbars. Not sure how that didn't happen actually. 

That's all I can remember. The ocean is freaking crazy. Just blows my mind that of all the things God has created we can know so little about so many of them. The ocean is just so much water. So. Much. Water. Such a simple thing, and yet it is one of the greatest mysteries on earth. Crazy. 

Anywho. Love you a ton. 

Elder Galbreath 5.0

Manahirana kely izany

You are right. I have been in Tamatave for a long time. It's wearing me down. Everything gets old after a while. I don't know. Just working hard, trying to do my best to find new people and get the ones we have to baptism. 

Speaking of baptism, we should have one of those next week! On the 27th there should be three people getting baptized. One of them is a guy that we tracted into literally like the second hour I was working in Morarano. His name is C. He is so cool, comes to church every week and just way excited about the gospel and baptism. He is 20, so that is way cool. We need more youth in the church. But he is way cool and I am excited for his baptism. The other people have been learning from the missionaries for a few years and just couldn't get their marriage papers done. It is really difficult sometimes to get that done here, especially if you are poor. But they finally got it done and so now there is nothing holding them back from baptism. So I am really excited for them. 

This week me and Elder Yeagley went tracting quite a bit. Actually we went tracting a lot. It wasn't tremendous amounts of fun but we found a pretty solid number of people to teach. So we have a nice full schedule this week but how many of the people will actually be there is anyone's guess. Then next week we will be tracting a lot again. Pretty fun little cycle. 

We have a member here, name is F, who is a national champ marathon runner, in the southeast regional rugby 7s team, speaks english like a champ (served in Johannesberg) and is a genius. And he plays soccer way well. He teaches math and english to kids trying to graduate. He is stud. And he is a good looking dude too. It's not really fair. Point of the story is he helps us a lot and Saturday we had a branch activity where we were going to be playing soccer against one of the other branches. It started at eight. So at seven thirty we met him at the church so he could show us where the heck we were even going. So we get there about eight, and we are the only ones there. We did some rugby passes with coconuts for a while, then just ended up sitting in the shade talking about the different parts of Madagascar. So at eight forty five someone else shows up with a ball, and at nine a few young men came so we had enough to play a little game of four on four. We did that for a while, my team lost. Then we called it a day at about ten. Nobody from the other branch even showed up. Turns out they were going on a party bus thing so they cancelled the activity on friday night. Phone trees are not a thing here so the only people that knew where the elder's quorum president and the other branch. Probably a good thing though because we didn't even have enough people to play a full game.  

Yep. Not a whole lot else to talk about this week. Gonna be going on splits this week so hopefully there will be a couple interesting stories from that. 

Love you a ton mom,

Elder Galbreath 5.0

                                            The edge of the soccer field is a dump

                                            Soccer field

                                           Garbage is everywhere.

                                         ready for soccer

Mitady ho faty ianao!

First of all thanks for the sports update, please keep those coming, at least with the Seahawks. 

Do we have pigs? I am unaware of this, do explain...

Mom's mac sounds cool. Are we becoming a mac family?  If I buy a windows phone will I be a black sheep? Can I still come to thanksgiving dinner? 

Are you pumped for the shoot? I am, and I won't even be there. 

Not a whole lot happened this week because I have been super sick. Just this nasty head cold/flu thing. Killer headache, runny nose, coughing. My body has been just sapped of any strength I had. It's been going on like this for two weeks now. I don't know what to do, I called the nurse and she told me to rest and take some tylenol. Well I took a day off finally on Saturday and I still feel like crap so that was worthless advice, and I didn't get anything done. So no more of that noise. Elder Yeagley has been way solid lately, getting really good at the language. He is just leading the lessons and we just do everything we can to work hard. My biggest expense lately has been tissues. Fun stuff right? So I have been relegated to mostly clarifying things that my comp says which are not so clear. It is not a role I am entirely happy with. But it's whatever. Training right? It's a thing. 

I love you guys so much. We tracted into this family that was pretty interested but the husband was never there so we kept trying and trying and trying and finally we caught him there and taught a lesson and they have a ton of potential. Excited to see where they are going. 

I really don't know what else to add. Sorry, just a mediocre week. I love you a ton though. 

Elder Galbreath v5.0

Love his sense of humor.

Funny kid.

If you bought the fleece already, read this one.

I don't know where you are at right now but I am trying to catch you before the end of the night.
That fleece is bomb! Buy it! That jersey is way cool though, and the hats. Not asking for more stuff but yeah. Good batch of merch this year, I can see why you are doing so well.
I will send you another email in a minute with the weeks stories but I want to try and catch you.

If you haven't bought the fleece yet, read this one.

I don't know where you are at right now but I am trying to catch you before the end of the night.

That fleece is mediocre, don't bother. That jersey is way cool though, and the hats. Not asking for more stuff but yeah. Good batch of merch this year, I can see why you are doing so well.

I will send you another email in a minute with the weeks stories but I want to try and catch you.

Now that I am writing Wyatt every week you guys might get the same emails for a little while, until I can mazaka three emails.

Alright so this week was pretty good. I stayed home Wednesday because I was really sick and worked the rest of the week in spite of being really sick. Fun right? I was actually sick Tuesday too but the AP's were up here going on splits with us so I couldn't stay home that day. Elder Fox (from Bothel area) was with us and he is way good at Malagasy so he and Elder Yeagley handled most of the work. Actually now that I think about it Elder Yeagley did most of it. Elder Yeagley has been doing way good this last week, leading lessons and progressing like a mad dog. I wish any of our investigators would try that hard haha.

So Wednesday was no fun, but Thursday we went out and worked crazy hard. We ended up spending about an hour walking around trying to find less actives with this one kid who you could call the ring leader and not be exaggerating. Unfortunately, they were all at a soccer game so they weren't home. Or at church yesterday. So that's cool. Upside though is that while we were walking around the neighborhood there were at least thirty kids all playing a really intense game of war. Not the card game, like the ones with fake guns had those and the ones that didn't made them out wood. There were some really intense ones, and then there was also a kid who had a plank. So they were of varying intensity I guess. But there was a point where I saw four kids with a strangely detailed sand map of the neighborhood devising a plan to attack the other stronghold, and there were prisoners taken at one point. I saw a kid tied to a tree at one point actually and that was a little weird but still.

Friday morning the Rossiters came down to Tamatave. They brought a bunch of money and a plan. Also they brought two new bikes. So one of those is mine, a very nice Scott in Seahawks colors. I call it Beast Mode. It is so choice. Pics on the bucket. Expect very few Elder Galbreath vs the poopy bike stories for my duration in Tamatave. Then they set about fixing completely and replacing parts on every single bike in Tamatave. So every bike works great now. Not as good as mine, but still.

Saturday was pretty standard stuff. We got a call about half way through the day though that was alarming. The president of Madagascar had his power go out for some reason, so he got mad and threw six of the top Jirama (like the PUD, they do all the water and power for Madagascar) officers in prison. So then Jirama got mad and threatened to cut all the power and water to the whole island if he didn't let them out. So we had to top off our supplies in case that happened. So far we still have power and water so I don't know what is up with that but yeah, we are ready.

Yesterday we just taught some lessons and had dinner. Church was alright, nothing special.

This morning has been pretty chill so far. The cyber is way busy though.

I got my package, thank you so much.  ( only took three months)

Hope you guys are doing well all alone up there.

Much love,
Elder Galbreath