Tuesday October 8
First thing we did today is teach a bunch of little kids
at the primary school. We thought it would start at 9, but it ended up
being at 9:30. Good thing because we were late. But essentially what we
did for an hour was talk to some kids who
interested, while the rest acted like wild animals. Not really, but
they were unruly to say the least. And one kid did pee in the corner of
the classroom. It's okay because they were dirt floors. So anyways,
right after that we got a text from the APs saying
that we had a leadership council that they wanted us to phone in to.
That was two hours long, so any extra proselyting hopes were vanquished,
because we also had to do a baptismal interview for the sister's in
Tabwakea. We did have a couple lessons though.
We got a lesson with this one guy that we haven't seen in awhile. He
told us that he believes in the church but has to work out some
weaknesses first. We're patient so it's good.
Wednesday October 9
Slept in Tabwakea because Elder Menzie needed the truck,
and we had district council anyway. District Council was good, me and
Elder Bartley changed the way we do things a little bit, so it was good.
I gave the spiritual thought and had to give
the announcement about a new standard about sisters and elders not
camping out in front each other's houses. We didn't have much of a
language training, but we had a good training about humility given by
Elder Geertsen. After that we had a bunch of lessons.
One of them was about the Restoration of the priesthood, and it went
really well. We did have a couple lessons fall through however, but that
is pretty expected honestly. At dinner we were talking to our hostess
about birthdays when she said her birthday was
Oct 9. I didn't make that connection and I don't think she really did
either, but Elder Bartley did, so we did a three verse happy birthday duo.
Thursday October 10
Today was good. We got some good contacting done early
in the morning, we made some contacts that seem pretty promising. Then
we had lunch, I had the Stanfield special, 2 eggs in Ramen noodle soup.
Then we had a couple people that we wanted
to see but they weren't home. One of our old investigators that moved
was finally found, as well as some new potential investigators. We tried
to find another one that had moved, but no success. We had a lesson
with Iotebwa about why exactly we need to be
baptized. It went well, the only problem is that they destroyed me by
making fun of my accent. There's a lesson in Humility there. When
everyone keeps telling you that you're good at speaking, it's a humbling
truth to have someone point out how bad you really
are.
Friday October 11
A busy day. We woke up and studied as usual, but we had
to go to Tabwakea to do needs. That took longer than I would have liked,
bit we did it in a relatively timely manner. We had a quick lunch and
started my favorite activity of the week,
weekly planning (that is sarcasm everyone). It's good for building
production capacity. Next we did something that I refuse to do 99% of
the time, which is teach teenagers by themselves, but it went okay. We
did it because one of them came to church, but I'm
anxious to find their parents. We found and scheduled a lesson with a
previous investigator of mine from when I worked in London. We had two
more lessons after that, one about the Divine Mission of Jesus Christ,
and the other was the beginning of the Plan
of Salvation. Afterwards we had dinner, and we are puffer fish (it's
okay because they has eaten some first, and they were telling me that
you die after like 50 seconds of eating bad puffer fish, so it was
safe).
So during one of our lessons, this lady was explaining
to us what happened to her when she prayed. So for some back story, when
we first met this lady, she didn't really want to lesson with us, she
always told us to just lesson with her husband
or her daughter. But us, as missionaries, took it upon ourselves to be
very stubborn and essentially demanding that she sit in on the lessons.
And with this family, for some reason or another we basically just
taught prayer/praying to know the truth every time
we came, and we never really moved on, because who knows. And she
usually just refused to pray, belonging to a religion that uses
memorized and recited prayers. Luckily for us (and it is lucky, read
Alma 17), her mother was sick and in the hospital. So essentially
that gave her a reason to pray. So in desperation, she said her first
prayer on her own. And since she was praying anyways, she also prayed
about Joseph Smith. She explained to us after wards, that she intended
to pray for a short time, but after she started
praying, it just kept going and going. She started crying during this
prayer, and she is, in her own words "bad at crying." She also explained
how she felt something come over her, but she couldn't really explain
it (#tractatuslogico-philosophicus). Anyways,
that next night she couldn't sleep, so she said another prayer with
similar results. Still not being able to sleep at midnight, she tried to
pray again, but got overcome by a feeling and after she opened her
prayer she was crying too hard and didn't want to
wake everyone up so she stopped. So when we came to her tonight, she
sas easily tje most ready for a lesson person I've met here. We asked
her to close the lesson, but she didn't want to cry in front of her
daughter so I had to finish it.
Saturday October 11
Well I guess not every day will produce the best
numbers, but it was good. Started off by tracting/contacting but nobody
would accept anything, which is odd. And not a lot of people were home.
We had 5 lessons planned besides that, but only
1 went through. We tried to contact as we went, but something was in
the air today that was making people reluctant to talk to us. We did sit
down with a person in our branch and he helped us with our language
problems though, so that was fun. The sisters
had a baptism, and the person wanted Elder Bartley to baptize him, so
we went down. One of their speakers didn't show up so behold, they did
choose I, Elder Stanfield, to speak on behalf of the absent one, and I
did speak concerning the doctrine of baptism,
and I did expound from the scriptures the principles of righteousness,
and I did preach according to my knowledge. The people we had dinner
with had a Botaki in London, so they dropped am insane amount of fish,
chicken and rice of at our house.
Sunday October 13
We got up in the morning, and drove a ways so we could
walk with some of our investigators to church. It wasn't actually that
far away, but while they were walking, they were talking about how far
it was. It was definitely no longer than from
our house (the old one on Butternut) to Jason Lee, probably closer.
There was a ton of people at church today, probably around 70, which is
easily an improvement from the first week we were here and it was closer
to 12. During church the Elders quorum decided
on a service project which was to fix one of the main dirt roads in a
part of Banana where a lot of members live. I thought it was a great
idea, but also a little funny, because if we went and just started
working on a road in Richland, we'd probably get arrested.
Anyways, we had a couple of lessons, all were pretty good, average
lessons. We had dinner and went toTabwakea to sleep.
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