First Part of January 2012

After the busy December we had we felt like we needed a month off. But that will never happen. We soon realized that we may have bitten off more that we can chew with our new teaching schedule. We planned to teach music conducting on Tuesday after our Swahili lesson, Self Reliance on Wed. after Swahili lesson and DDM with the missionaries, and “Teaching, No Greater Call” on Thursday after Swahili lesson. Then on Saturday we teach the YSA kids the Institute lessons on the Old Testament. We are also trying to get a group ready to go to the Temple in South Africa. And there are several here that want to serve a mission so we have been telling them we will start a Missionary Preparation class. Then we try to have at least a spiritual thought for the missionaries on Monday night at our Family Home Evening. We find that we spend most of our time preparing lessons. But that is good. We are learning a lot.

Teaching here is quite an experience. It is so hard to tell if they understand. We are still not able to speak and understand the language all that well. So we ask a question and a lot of times they just look at us with a blank stare. Quite often there is someone in the class that speaks english well enough to interpret for us. And we usually get the point across.

We have had good success with our music class. We have had 4 regular attendees and they seem to be picking it up quite well.

The Self Reliance class has not done so good. Part of the problem is the time. There aren’t a lot of members that can attend during the week days.

The “Teaching, No Greater Call” class is the one the members really want. The Second Counselor in the Branch Presidency has suggested that we move that class to Saturday so more members could attend.

We really made an effort to get the Branch to follow the church curriculum this year. They have been in the habit of just teaching from the one manual they have in Swahili and they often teach the same lesson in Relief Society that is taught in Sunday School. And the lessons have been taught over and over for so long we just felt they needed to expand the knowledge base. But it will be very hard because all the manuals for this year are only in English. The Sunday School is course this year is the Book of Mormon and there is only a manual for the teacher. So that should work quite well because they have the Book of Mormon in swahili. We will see as the year progresses.

We lost 2 of our Elders this transfer.

But we gained 2 really good ones. We will enjoy working with them and learning more about them. It is always fun to have new Elders come into our area. They bring in new ideas and a transfusion that is always good.

Elder Pocock came in by bus and just in time for us to get him to his flat and head to the airport to pick up Elder Madise. It’s always fun to drive out to the “Kilimanjaro” airport. It’s out of town about an hour and we usually get a really good view of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The most exciting thing this month so far was the Street Board thing the Elders did. They have been talking about doing something like that for some time. And on the 14th they finally got it all together. 

We have YSA on Saturday so we could not be there the whole time but we got them and the equipment downtown and helped them get set up. 

Then we worked with those that stopped by for about 2 hours. 

Then we had to run to the YSA lesson and activity. They had a lot of people stop by. They made about 300 contacts and setup 70 or 80 appointments. It will be interesting to see what develops from that activity.

We have had some very spiritual experiences this month. The spirit was so strong at our Fast and Testimony meeting you could almost cut it with a knife. The members here are so strong in the face of such difficult circumstances. Our testimonies grow stronger every day as we watch them work so hard to serve in the church. We just love these members!!