More great information about how the work is going including splits with the branch president. And apparently how complicated the streets are in Ambohimanarina. Ambohimanarina--say that three times fast.
Subject: "Yes Mr. President?" "Um, nothing, goodnight."
First off, I just want to bring up the Christmas call home. To put it simply, I have no idea what to do. I would be fine with just a normal phone call or something, or a skype or google call. The problem with that here is basically just the internet. You know those times when you type in the place you want to go and it SAYS it's working on it and the little bar is filling up, but then it doesn't finish for like 10 whole minutes? Yeah... that's pretty much what it's like all the time. Today it took my about 35 minutes to log into my email. Which kind of sucks. But the moral of this story is, I'm really not sure how these computers could handle a Skype call, even if it's just voice. So some work will have to be done about that.
And now, to the interesting part of this letter: missionary things. The work has been going pretty good. We talked with some of the investigators that keep not attending church (another big problem here) and told them that if they don't come next week, we'll have to stop teaching them. If they won't progress, we have to go find people that will. Sad but true. Hopefully they'll actually follow through on their part.
On another fun note, Elder Landon and I went on splits yesterday. He went with a member named Tojo, and I got to go with our branch president. Who is Malagasy. Oh goodie. It turns out he actually spoke a bit of English (about as much as I speak Malagasy), so we were able to communicate okay. I took him to an investigator named Boto, where we explained the Law of Chastity. After the lesson, he started asking great questions, about what exactly is polygamy, what happens if there's a married couple but then one of them dies, and things like that. It was awesome to hear questions that actually applied to the lesson and could help in some way. Instead of things like "okay, so that's a picture of the First Vision. But who took the picture?" Oh dear. But yeah, Boto is awesome.
Then we stopped by Patrick's house (recently baptized kid, in the picture with Georgette and Leonce from a couple weeks ago) and went back over the last three principles of the Gospel: baptism by water, baptism by the Spirit, and enduring to the end. He's a great kid, and remembered the lessons pretty well, so no problems there.
The big problem of the day was the next appointment, when we were supposed to stop by another recent convert's house, but I forgot where it was. So we just kind of wandered around for a while. Stupid brain. Thank you for nothing, you useless reptile.
On a note of my righteousness, the other elders at my house keep telling me that I shouldn't read Jesus the Christ during personal study time, because we're supposed to focus on the scriptures and things. And I thought if that's true, I should probably follow that. But if you follow my to page VIII in Preach My Gospel, you'll see on the bottom half of the page a list of approved personal study time material. And what's FIRST on that list? Oh, Jesus the Christ? Yeah, I'm going to follow Preach My Gospel, but thanks for the thought. Another thing that I've noticed is just how crazy awesome the scriptures are. There's some good stuff in there. Study the scriptures.
To wrap this up, I don't know what's happened, but ever since I showed up here I've been having the coolest dreams ever. A couple nights ago I dreamed that Leonardo Di Caprio (or however you spell that) was teaching me and a bunch of people how to use the dream thing in Inception. So in my dream, we'd go into another dream (two levels) and just do a bunch of crazy stuff. It's just awesome.
Anyway, the mission is great, everyone keep working hard and writing.
Thank you all!
- Elder Arrington
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