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
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