Hello dear all of you,
I send my greetings from my new island abode! And I will share two very applicable words with all of you. The first is mandripaka, which means to completely destroy or slay, and then the other is mikakakaka, which means to laugh loudly.
I will share the scripture of the week earlier in the email with you, because it is all too applicable to the events of the week! Moses 6:55 (if I remember right) which says that we taste the bitter to know to prize the sweet. And that is definitely the lesson learned from this week as we basically got a good ole bite of straight tamarin root! (which is really bitter just to clarify haha) cause after my sickness last weekend, which took me a good chunk of the entire rest of the week to recover from totally, Elder Thia got completely mandripaka-ed by the same type of sickness! So after missing multiple days of work last weekend we again weren't able to go out to work Friday or Saturday, and he barely was able to make it to church on Sunday, too. But I was like we must go to church, it would probably be good if the ward missionaries didn't end up on the less-active list to be discussed in the next ward council! So yeah, needless to say I got far too much good studying done this week. Not too much to do in a missionaries house when you are stuck in it an entire day. It was a very productive time at church, so that was a blessing I will gladly accept! We are looking forward to a much brighter, healthier, sweeter week this week, one we will appreciate all the more because of last week!
We have our crazy and totally awesome Antandroy mom, looking out for us though haha. She always calls when she doesn't see us out or hears that we are sick, just to make sure we are alright. Never fear when she is near, our secondary African mother! Such a champion. That reminds me, I need to drop off my pants at her house so she can fix them for me...
Even the days we did have the health to work were a little rougher than usual, which is no big deal because it gave us an opportunity to get some good tracting practice in! (we have been blessed with such a good program recently that I haven't had to do much contacting at all in the last month.) Yet again I had more encounters with Comorrian buds, a group of like 6 men living in this house all going to school here; dropped a few Comorrian phrases on them and everything, so I guess it was all worth it going 0 for 7 on our afternoon appointments that day! We also got to tract at some point during the week at our areas equivalent of Hollywood, or so it felt cause the houses were so huge and nice. And it was probably about the same as in Hollywood too in that the security was a little difficult to get through! Guess I need to work a little bit harder on my ninja skills huh? The walls weren't THAT high.
Oh, awesome thing that did happen on Sunday, remember the member I told you about, and his crazy amazing conversion story and how great he is in general? Yeah, so he was made the new ward mission leader!!! I'm so excited, he is basically the wards Malagasy version of Elder Holland.
We have yet to see conference here, we get to see it in two weeks! Glad it was awesome, I can't wait to see it. Us missionaries get to watch it in English, at least here in Tana.
Update on investigators: still a struggle getting people to church! We teach awesome people, but they just don't come! The main project I am starting now is the Build-a-friend initiative (just named it like 5 seconds ago, give me some slack) haha ...where we are going to work much more closely with individual members to get them connected with our investigators through our lessons during the week, and then that way strong enough friendships develop so that they can pick them up and go to church and not be awkward. Much more than just member present lessons, but literally having certain members receive investigators like they are their own personal investigator, not the missionaries. This is something President Adams talked about in zone conference, and it needs to happen. I have been coordinating much better with the ward in hopes to accomplish that. Not a novel idea for sure.
Final thought, which I may have already shared before-- there is a talk given by Brad Wilcox at BYU called His Grace is Sufficient. Ridiculously amazingly good. Read it.
Love
Elder Fox
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