Of Mice and Men

Hey everyone,

    Sorry about the furnace, that kind of stinks. (Our furnace stopped working this week )  The meat is great. (One of the packages we sent was an all meat package.)   Helgesen usually gets some meat in his packages too.  Everything made it just fine, no problems as far is I could tell.  I still haven't opened the 3 Christmas ones and I haven't gotten Grandma's, but I did get her non-dear elder letter recently.

     I'm not going to lie.  This week was not the highlight of my mission so far.  Zone meeting really depressed and killed our apartment.  I found it hard to get out of bed some mornings.  We are looking for things to re-motivate us this week.  This week wasn't all bad and boring though.  We met with most of our golden investigators this week.  Talking with them makes me smile because of their desire to learn (and the fact that they like us coming for a reason other than we are white).  Temple would have been baptized yesterday but he said he wanted to extend and be baptized with his roommate, so Dec. 7th, hopefully.  We haven't found many new investigators.  We have 40 with baptismal dates already, but most aren't serious, but a lot are cool.

    We killed a mouse in the apartment this week.  Helgesen hid Adams's name tag and he was looking for it in the evening.  He looked under our bed and saw a mouse hide.  So Adam's and I grabbed some brooms and mops, shut all the doors, pulled apart Helgesen's bed, and chased the mouse out.  It made one lap around the room before we finally cornered it and smacked it.  Mice can jump by the way, and they are fast.  We scooped it up and threw it outside.  It was really fun.  I have pics of the mouse and the room after.  As of yet we haven't seen any other mice.  We chased this guy a month or two ago in the other room but he got away till now.


Of Mice and Men

the room after

   Yesterday was an all Africa stake conference.  We met at Branch One (which most of our investigators couldn't find, so our numbers weren't high).  A seventy spoke in the broadcast and the Primary General President, Bednar and Uchtdorf.  It was cool.  We got there right on time so the chapel was full.  Helgesen and I went to an adjacent classroom and listened.  We also ended up playing nursery leader.  They killed my pen with their drawings, but they were cool kids.  The talks were good.  The Primary Pres. talked about love at home,  Bednar (who is over the West Africa missions) talked about member missionary work.  Uchtdorf's was interesting.  He talked about a lot of things, but the thing I remember was him telling members to stop the current marriage practices of bride prices.  I don't know how well that will go over but it would help with co-habitation.  He also mentioned the Ebola crisis.  The Branch Presidents of West Africa have been asked to have their members fast for the Ebola crisis.

    I hope this week will be more up beat.  I will work on it myself to be more positive.  I think that my Thanksgiving meal might consist of fried fish.  We bought a large box of fish this week.  It had 80 something fish inside.  Good sized fish too.  I mainly cook them up and make tuna fish sandwiches (with mayo, I think it is missing something) and fried fish.  Hopefully we can get one baptism this week.

Enjoy Thanksgiving.  I love you all a lot

Love Elder Warner Ashby