Dog, Food Donations and a Seventy

Wow two areas with Elder Ransom is crazy! We have been working so hard nonstop and it's great! We've been working on removing people who haven't been progressing. The craziest part is that We've stopped teaching like 10 people so far but found like 8 more! God is using us as much as he can ha-ha!

Monday evening, we went by a part member family and taught the mom, Jeanne, how to sing some hymns. Their daughter was baptized 2 weeks ago but the mom hasn't been baptized yet. She liked the sacrament hymn and how it taught about the savior. Then she had us cut up a massive watermelon. I was feeling a little sick that night and it carried throughout the week, I just love my nose...

We met a few new guys on Tuesday and helped a new member prepare to give a talk at the upcoming baptism. The new ones are Swahili speaking and I think I'm improving. The hard part about being so busy is that it's really difficult to sit down and language study so I am struggling at learning all the vocab I need for these lessons. 

On Wednesday, I exchanged in north with Elder Gerlach. We walked around in the rain, and it was pretty fun, we found some cool people and placed a couple copies of the Book of Mormon. My nose was pretty bad, and the rain definitely didn't help. But we got muddy shoes, and it was great, I felt really like a missionary in that moment going from house to house in the rain to bring these people Christ's gospel. Elder Gerlach then showed me that night his impressive juggling skills! He's surprisingly super good at it. 

Thursday, we tried to do weekly planning but honestly didn't get through much more than half of our people before we had to leave. We visited Precieux again, which is always fun. We also do a bunch of video calls because Elder Ransom has discovered that it's easier than fighting with busy schedules and also, we don't have to worry about getting a man there! We taught one woman named Kasinde about joseph smith... again... we are wondering how good her memory really is because we often have repeat lessons. Also, she is on baptism date for a few weeks, and we don't know if she will be prepared by then. Truthfully probably not, but we're working towards it anyway!

Friday morning, we had a great service project where we got a ton of food from SLC to give to local charities here in Lexington. It was run by a counsel that I discovered existed recently ha-ha. It's called the area coordinating counsil. It's a group that is called to run outreach, service, and area wide issues. We got to meet Elder Vern P. Stanfil, he gave the general conference talk called "The imperfect harvest", which is so good! It turns out that he served his mission in southern France! He was talking to some English missionaries and they pointed over to us saying "yeah we work English but those elders over there are French speaking", to which Elder Stanfil came over and started talking to us in French haha! I got so tongue tied at first because I got nervous ha-ha. I also got to pet a Czech shepherd, he was like a German shepherd, but his coloring was a bit different and had a bigger tail. He was so cute and nice! We also went to Norbert and Julienne but Berth, their daughter, had fallen and we think hurt her leg. So, we said a prayer and left, then we went to English class and met 3 kind Haitians. 

Saturday, we had another funeral at the church and met with Byenigulu. We met some African members from Columbus Ohio and Arizona. That was super cool! We taught Byenigulu about testimonies and tried to help him understand that we can be a witness of something even if we weren't there, but that it's only possible through the holy ghost. We're going to have to discuss it further at another time. 

Sunday there was a baptism which was great. It's always amazing to see people progress further in their covenant with God. We also met with the relative of a member family and she fed us fufu. It was great and we got to learn that Congolese have some confusing family structures ha-ha. Like they call some select aunts and uncle's mom and dad but not others. And some cousins are brother and sister but not others. It all has some weird rules ha-ha. 

Lately I'm working on keeping my focus on holy things and trying not to get distracted. It's hard ha-ha. But I know that it's worth it because if I can spend more time focused on God and my friends here,

I will know better how to serve them. So I encourage you all to do the same. What is stealing your focus that you can cut out? Make sure you replace it with something else or you will never gain control of your thoughts. 

I love you all! have a great week!

Area Combining Again??

This was a surprise honestly, when transfer calls came on Wednesday I assumed me, and Elder Kocherhans were staying the same and others would transfer around us. But apparently God wanted me to learn Swahili well right now ha-ha. 

We taught Julienne and Byenigulu joined. We talked for a while about her reservations with coming to church. Her big thing right now is that she has responsibilities with her other church and that it feels wrong to take the sacrament with another church. At one-point Byenigulu goes "the missionaries are trying to say come and see, you don't have to take the sacrament or join us, but just come and see if what they teach is true and how we do things." She was saying how she believes us and that we come from God, so I said, "why not come?" Eventually she said she would come next week because she had something to do this week.

We taught Jules and he said he would come to church and is interested in knowing what our religion believes. We talked about baptism with him too and he said that he wants to come check out what we teach in our church and would be open to the idea of being baptized again if he finds that what we teach us true. That was so exciting for me because he was truly open! 

On Friday we went by Philip and had a very long conversation about the book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. He asked us if anyone has joined the church and become a missionary, so we called Elder Ballard and he had just the right things to say! He talked about how the missionaries were the first people to invite him to pray to God for truth and that his answer was the peace that comes from reading the book. He is actually interested in reading the Book of Mormon now, before it was just something interesting, he liked to discuss but now I think he understands what we're saying about it. Also, his wife is an inactive member because of unanswered questions in the past so we're going to go by again and talk about them. 

On Thursday, we helped Landrye with some forms to bring her son to America. She has cancer and is receiving treatment. When discussing her future, she told me, "Bird, I'm not afraid of death, God knows my time here on earth. I'm want to meet Joseph Smith." I was really sad to hear that because she's only in her 50s but I know God takes care of his people and that she is right before God. 

Can I just say that combining areas is hard work when you have a lot of people you're teaching. But it is nice to be busy. 

Nzamwita is a man from West's area. He came to church for the second week in a row and in our lesson on Saturday he said he will be baptized if he receives a response that the Book of Mormon is true. So that was exciting! The lesson was all in Swahili and it was pretty good! 

Last thing, on Sunday evening we knocked some people we haven't seen in a while and a kind Swahili mama gave us vitumbua which means snacks, ha-ha. They were tasty rice balls!

So there's my week, a lot more even happened! But I'm excited to continue learning in this transfer. I'm working to break some bad habits and I need some help. Please pray for me to have the strength to have the energy and willpower to grow. Thank you everyone and know I pray daily for you. 

Elder Baird