Monday, September 14, 2009

Letter from Josh 14 September 2009

(picture from when he first left and was in the MTC in Johannesburg--just wanted to see him this morning.)
Dear Family,

Time is wierd on mission. the days seem like weeks but the weeks seem like days. I dont believe its been another week. according to mom it has been 45 weeks now, feels more like 4.5 weeks. today is day one of the new transfer, which is even harder for me to believe than the 45 week thing. there is just no way i have been in mombasa for 6 weeks already. we get transfer news tonight, so thats when i will know about if the area is spliting, i hope it doesnt, i dont know it yet.
Congratulations to Kayla!!! it sounds like it was a lot of fun, and of course michael and sam wouldnt miss the byu game over the after party. i heard byu is suppose to be really good this year though. we beat the number three team or something like that. awesome!
looks like meg had a killer weekend trip to vegas, probably two weekends ago now, but i'm still super jealous! cant wait to go dancing again, but i wouldnt even think of going to the clubs here. there are way too many hookers in this city to think that clubbing would be a good idea here, i might go in nairobi, but in mombasa that would just be asking for std's.
the week went pretty smoothly for me though. we got a bunch of referals from the members, which was awesome. and had four more baptisms yesterday. so yea, things just seem to happen without too much effort here. the problem is that most of our teaching pool is baptised and so we now spend half the week with recent converts. which is way fun and all but it slows the finding and teaching part down a bit. plus we have been looking for apartments since we are supose to be getting two more elders here and so that takes a lot of time too.
Sometimes i feel that the people we are teaching just dont understand a word we are saying or a thing that they are reading, and it just confuses me as to why they come or meet with us in the first place. and there is this investigator named teresa that has been like that since i got here. so last time we met we just told her to start the book of mormon from the beggining and read through it as much as she could before our next apointment. because leaving chapters about specific topics didnt seem to work at all. when we went this week, it seemed the same, we were asking questions and trying to judge if she understood and once again it was like a brick wall. so then we asked if she had any questions about the reading. she then went on to explain the first six chapters of the book of mormon perfectly with lots of details and everything, and then asked "why wouldnt laman and lemuel listen even when they had seen angels and etc" I was so happy!!! she explained everything in swahili instead of english, which we still need to work on, but the reading she did was in english. It was so good just to see that she actually understood, that she wasnt just a moving brick that had been told she needed to go to a church. That was the highlight of this week forsure.
Anyways, i love you guys! have a great week.

Love,
Elder Harris

P.S. i did go out to eat, thats what i took the money out of the account for (dad will know what i mean even if you dont know about it) we went to a place called tamarind, its a way nice sea food place, it was good, but i just felt out of place the whole time. And i have no idea what i want for my birthday, but just so you know, all of those small toys that are in the packages, i really have no use for them, like the magnet guy or the ball with the lights that you sent at christmas. i did use the glow sticks one night when we stayed up and had a midnight bbq since we were going to spend all of the next day on the bus, but for the most part, that stuff doesnt do me much good. i know you are trying and that you send it because you love me, and i thank you for that, but i cant really do anything with it.
P.S.S. spencer, keep rocking the golf course, and just remember; lean wit' it, rock wit' it!

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