Hello once again. I feel like I was just here. Its all becoming a blur. I don't even realize what is going on with the days anymore.
This week was an interesting one. We had a lot of crazy things happen. Today I am just super tired and exhausted from everything we went through in the week. But I endured and we survived.
On Tuesday morning we had a meeting with the Relief Society presidency to start preparing the Branch mission plan for this year. We had an amazing meeting. Those sisters are powerful. We spent an hour discussing different needs and goals and things. The spirit was there. Something that I learned is that men are nothing compared to a woman. I don't want anyone to get offended by that, but you can't deny that a woman's spiritual stature is just enormous compared to a man's! Its amazing how a lot of women in the world just sit back and let the men try and fail at whatever they set out to do; then they offer a bit of advice and watch the men try to do it again. They just sit back and watch when they could just do everything themselves. Men are given the Priesthood so they can at least have a chance to reach the spiritual stature of a woman. I love women :) The world would be even more lost than it is if there was no women!
Haha anyways, that was random. The meeting was amazing.
Wednesday we spent the entire day in Bugembe. In the morning time we had our Zone Meeting. It was a great meeting and everyone participated in everything we discussed. Then we were supposed to have a small new years celebration for like 30 minutes after the meeting, but it failed. We left it up to all the District Leaders in the zone to get it organized. Yea, it didn't work out. So everyone was confused what was going on and we ended up sitting around and then going to lunch. Around 4:00 President Chatfield and the assistants came. President was interviewing all the missionaries. During the interviews the assistants were doing some training on teaching the Plan of Salvation. We practiced teaching in simplicity so the spirit can testify of the truth of the message and so the time in the lesson can be reduced. It was a powerful and spiritual meeting. My companion and I were inspired and put everything into practice immediately.
Thursday was of course New Years! It was an interesting day. In the morning we got a call from a member that our Elders Quorum President died Wednesday evening. That was a shock. He was still young and had many ambitions in life. But he apparently was really sick with internal things for a long time and never told anyone. So it got him this week. The Branch did a fantastic job preparing for the funeral. We went to the church after studies & planning to go somewhere, but the members were busy taking chairs and stuff from the church to take to the family's house for the funeral service. Our plans instantly changed and we helped with all of that for most of the day. We felt it would do more good to help with the funeral than to go about our plans for the day. So it was just a different day.
Friday was the funeral service. It started around 2:00 when it was supposed to start around 12:00. And then it went on for hours and hours. I was amazed at how many people were there. I guessed probably 500 or 600 people attended. Family members, friends, random people that stayed around, and then the members from the Branch. We endured. It was so weird to see him in the casket when just last Sunday he was at church and seemed completely fine. Life is just full of surprises!
On Saturday we did a bit of contacting in the morning at the church. It was nice and we contacted some cool people. Not sure now how well they will progress though. One lesson was with the father of a recent convert family; he is still an investigator and he doesn't' know English very well so we have to teach with a member translating. We taught the restoration, then afterwards the family had prepared some food that we had to eat. When we left the house and looked at the time, we realized that it had only been 45 minutes since the lesson started. We taught the entire Restoration lesson through a translator and ate food all in 45 minutes!!! That was a miracle. I was amazed we were able to do that. It helps so much to just teach simple and basic principles and not deep Doctrine. Haha!!! :)
Sunday was crazy. Church was great as usual. We had a member get a goat for us the previous day. We were planning to go and pick it up from their house after church. Well they showed up to church with the goat! We weren't to comfortable keeping a goat in front of the church, worrying about what people would think. So we decided to just put it in the truck and take it home real quick then come back to the church. So as soon as Sacrament meeting finished we went to take the goat home. When we were almost to the house, there was a boda-boda that turned in front of us. I didn't see him coming, but my companion warned me. It was too late. I tried my best to slam on the brakes and avoid a crash. We slowed down just enough to knock the boda down with its passenger. There was a bit of damage on the motorcycle, not really too much. And the passenger had a few minor bruises from hitting the ground. Luckily it happened right next to a police post, so the police came to help us. What should have been a quick and easy problem to solve turned into something that lasted about 6 hours! A lot of arguing back and forth for hours with everyone trying to get as much money out of us as possible. Eventually we agreed to take the driver and passenger to a clinic to get checked out. We covered their treatment and then the boda left. Only 6 hours later. We got home at around 6:00. it happened around 11:30. So we missed the rest of church and some appointments afterwards and some members got super worried about us. It was stressful and really exhausting. Everything is ok now though! The moral of the story is DON'T LEAVE CHURCH EARLY.
Today for Pday we had a zone activity. The goat that caused all the chaos yesterday was eaten today. We cut it up and cooked it with a bunch of other things. Everyone in the zone participated in all the cooking. It was fun and was a great way to build unity. We had goat, chappatis, pilau, stew with goat meat and potatoes and stuff, then I made some chocolate chip cookies and a cake. it was all super delicious!!!!!!!! We had a great time. But it was also exhausting and I am really tired right now.
BTW, we are not required to kill chickens and goats on mission! That is just a side activity that we wanted to do and we had to sacrifice our own money for it. Most of the other missionaries in the mission don't do it, but its just a cool experience. So I am sorry if I offended anyone with those stories.
Elder and Sister Squire said that they have a blog. They update it every week and apparently I am in a lot of the things from that past couple weeks. Their blog is squireugandamission.blogspot.com. So if your interested, check it out! They were with us today when we were doing all the cooking and said they would put it on the blog next week.
Congrats to all the returned missionaries and new missionaries. It seems like there was a lot of those this week.
My toe is doing fine. I am still putting antibiotic ointment and band aids on it. I hope I can stop soon. Its annoying to have to do that.
Have a great week all! Love you :)
Elder LeCheminant
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