Hello Everyone!
First of all, yesterday was awesome! After church there was a solar eclipse!! It was pretty sweet. You could only really see it with sunglasses. I took a few pics through my sunglasses. They are pretty cool. A lot of the young people here didnt know how to describe the eclipse. So they just would say that the sun was fighting the moon. And then I told everyone that the moon won! Haha funny people. Then after that we went to the orphanage to play soccer. I was the goal keeper. I did pretty good. My old keeper skills were coming back from however long ago it was when I played soccer. It was really fun! Anyways. The rest of the week went well. I cant believe it is already November. I just left yesterday in May!! We kinda forgot about Halloween until the evening on Thursday. Then we started telling everyone "Happy Halloween!" and they would have no idea what we were talking about. We would try to explain it but Elder Buyers and I realized that we really dont know why we have Halloween. It seems like kinda a pointless holiday. One of the companionship's in our zone switched each others name tags for the day. Funny! I wish we would have thought of something like that.
On Wednesday we had our ZDM or zone development meeting. There have been a ton of changes made to the mission! First of all, the mission is going away from being numbers oriented. We were really focused on daily numbers (of lessons) and used to even report to the zone leaders every day, now that is done away with. Also President Chatfield wants us to start focusing on rescuing people that are lost and retaining our recent converts. Basically the mission has had about 17 or 18% retention over the last two years. So there are a ton of less active people. So now we are working on that as much as we can. Crazyess. Anyways, I'm really happy and excited about the way the mission has changed. Its really hard to describe everything over an email but there was a lot of other things as well.
On Saturday we had a fun party at the church. It was a graduation celebration for our Branch President. He just got his bachelors degree from a university here. So we had a big party. Ugandans really love their celebrations. The "ceremony" part took forever. They spent like 2 hours just introducing all of his friends and family members from the village. My head hurt sooo bad! Oh yea, I have had the flu since like Wednesday morning, it is now just about done with. So my head was hurting really bad from the flu and just sitting there forever, then it started to rain!! Haha, everyone picked up their chairs and ran inside the chapel. That was really funny to watch. There wasnt enough room in the chapel because it is really really small. So people were just crammed in. They decided to cancel the rest of the program and bring out the food. The food was sooo good! We had rice, beans, goat, sheep, chicken, steamed cabbage, and cassava. Super delicious. Cassava is like a giant root that they boil. Also typical to Uganda, for big groups of people they always have a ton of bowls for food but they have zero utensils. So we got to eat by hand! I actually really like eating with my hands. It helps you get more into the food. Hahahaha. Enough about that.
I cant really think of anything else that happened.
Congrats to Becky Sorenson! I feel like she just left like less than a year ago. But that's awesome that she is back.
Yea i got the exercise band and the ctr rings. Shanks a lot!! We do have to pay a little bit to get packages. It costs 6000 shillings for a bigger package and 3000 for a small one. SO whoever picks them up at the Postbank (that's what they call post office here) pays the money and we just pay them whenever we get it. I think it is just a flat charge regardless of what is inside. I'm not 100% sure about that though. Just put pictures of Jesus all over the box, I've heard that helps it go through customs. Oh yea, I few things I wanted you to send. Some taco seasoning and that Johnny's all purpose seasoning. I cant remember anything else for now. Thanks!! :)
Thanks for everything. I love you all. Until next week
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