March 7, 2011

Elder Hulme and Elder Freeman live here

It feels good to have a nice clean new house.  No extra stuff or anything.  The tricky part is that it takes a lot to keep this place clean.  It's all white tile floor that holds and shows dirt clearly.  Our upstairs neighbors are virtually not there, and the lady across the street sells Ijsjes for .50 SRD.  Ijsjes are home made popsicles, and hers are quite tasty.  She's this nice lady named Olga, must be 120 years old.  She has these awful dogs that bark at us while we are in our house, and bark more when we come outside.  She then begins chasing them down throwing shoes and rocks at them until they shut up.  It's hilarious.  Some dogs broke into her trash bags last night, so this morning we helped her clean up.  It's funny, our neighborhood is ghetto!  100% creole and tons of little kids.  I like it though, even though our house stands out compared to all the other ones... I don't like that part much, but I guess it's not that important really. 

A pretty decent-looking kitchen

This week was a good one.  We haven't seen Navin yet, but it'll come.  We went to Brother Borgia last night, he's a member thats been in the church for about 18 years, which is 3 years less than the church has been in Suriname.  He's medium active, knows everything about the church, but really isn't all the way converted.  He studies, all kinds of books and stuff, but the connection from his brain to his spirit isn't quite there yet. 

A swerver (?) sleeping outside of their church building

 We gathered as a zone, and everyone shared one thing that they thought we could do or stop doing to make our zone more righteous, and become better missionaries.  So I said that we all needed to certify, or progress in the training president Gamiette gave us to do, but not many people have done.  So for 40 days, we will all be working on that, in addition to all the other things that the other missionaries said. The fast is also in an effort to prepare to meet our goal of baptizing 89 people in Suriname before the end of the year, and to bring more unity to the zone. 

Elder Freeman eating breakfast

I was really tired the whole weekend, probably from a lack of sleep all week.  I only slept for about 5 hours on Monday, then was up late and out of bed early the whole week.  Being tired is such an interesting sensation, I really don't care for it.  Luckily getting up at 6:30 is mostly natural for me now.  I've worked so hard to develop that habit, I'm holding on to it for the whole rest of my life.  And I think in D&C it is a commandment somewhere anyway, to get up early.  It's interesting looking at myself 2 years ago, thinking that the commandment didn't apply to me?  Even one year ago.. but then I was still working at Sundance, and had to get up at 7. 

Everyone said something about my year mark coming up, and I realized that also, just yesterday.  It's scary because I haven't even done anything yet!  I am however excited to see if I can do better with the last half than I have the first, it's going to be tough to top.

Good news.  Yesterday, Rachel was confirmed a member of the church, a woman I found and taught in Munder.