Okay, it is kind of already super late for me (almost 21:00, time to be home) because today has been kind of crazy (4 hours of sleep then a... supply run to Nelspruit, South Africa) but we had a productive week to justify today's little fun! 

This week was the baptism of Antonio's family! That was definitely the highlight of the week for us. Things were going very well, everyone flew through the interviews... Then we realized that we were short, well clothes for every single one of them. After 2 hours of driving around everywhere in the city we finally rounded up enough clothes for everyone. 

The day came on Saturday and the baptism started awesomely........ Because we got a call saying the baptismal font was filled with dirt and nastiness..... After we ran a few errands we came back to find Elder Lemmon and Elder Godfrey had cleaned it all up and were trying to fill it up as fast as possible. This included the tap on, a garden house running through the window into the font and us doing a bucket chain of sorts from the kitchen sink. 

After about an hour and a half of panicking to fill the font, everyone from the two wards, investigators and missionaries all showed up we got things going along. The baptisms all went well given everything (Mozambican's really don't like cold.... getting dunked in cold water isn't too fun for them), thankfully most of them went smoothly. 

Oh, fun side note,  you can see in the photos that all of Antonio's kids are wearing just shirts.... We had to share the baptismal suits, the kids were small, we had extra shirts laying around.... It worked. This is Africa.

I hope everyone had a great week!  

Until next week!

Elder Howell

 Baptisms!

 Baptisms of Antonio and Esmeralda and some of their children.

 The FedEx mail room, imagine the regular post office ;)

 Snack stop on our supply run to Nelspurit, South Africa with President and Sister Senna.

 A little fun in Nelspruit, South Africa.  

Elder Skraba, Elder Howell, Sister Senna and President Senna.

Another super fast week

This was another super fast week. We are still working with Antonio and Esmeralda to get baptized this week. Everything is all lined up for Saturday, fingers crossed.

Everything this week was normal but with lots of copy making.... we were printing hundreds and hundreds of invites, manuals and other things for the creation of 2 new branches and a district in the province of Nampula. Once we had finished preparations we headed out on Wednesday.

We flew in Wednesday night to beautiful 33° C..... Good start... The next day was spent walking around the city looking for houses with a local guy. We probably saw 20 or so houses ranging from super cheap, beat up, half destroyed to mansions. It was interesting. It was hot. It hit 38° C and I have never drunk so much water....and Coke.... in my life during an 8 hour period. The following day was the same for the first 4 hours then we found two good houses. The following 24 hours was a mess running around between the two houses to get all the paperwork filled out to rent the houses with speratic meals with people.

All in all the work paid off and we have 2 more houses in Nampula. We had lots of things to do but it all worked out, I got to see the place that I wanted to go (and now don't....) and got to try some great, and some awful, foods.

This week will be a lot of visiting with our investigators to make up for last weeks absence.

Have a great week!

Elder Howell

PS: Coke is doing a promotional thing here kinda like McDonald's Monopoly.... but with the underside of caps for Coke, sprite and fanta to win bikes (once you collect the 5 parts) and you can win 2L's and other stuff.... Elder Skraba and I will win a bike!

PPS: Lots of photos as promised

Quick Update

Hello people,

This week was, well, just another week honestly. No big or exciting events.....

Lots of organizing documents, payments, records and contracts. We got some new filing cabinets.... yay. That took way too long to organize all the 2017 stuff, but now it's easy to keep up.

We got a new Sister from Angola this week- Sister Silva. That was a bit of a random thing because it's mid transfer but she finally got her visa. Now we have 7 sisters, odd numbers are bad... but it will all work out.

Pedro is doing well and his sister is still happy as ever to have her brother along for the life journey on the straight and narrow path. We still owe them a "cake for maheu" trade... No idea how to spell that Xangana word, but it's this white fluffy drink. Anyone who knows me knows I love trying all new drinks. This one scares me. It's kind of like semi fermented corn flower, sugar and water..... in a reused soda bottle. If done wrong it's alcoholic. Thankfully the member is a pro.... updates to come.

António and Esmeralda's baptismal date is getting pushed to the 28th because we will be out of town this week. They are actually getting the lessons down a lot better than we thought. Third times the charm for each lesson I guess!

Have a great week! Enjoy the cold for me!!

Elder Howell

Monday Again?

This email will be really fast given that it's 23:20.... We just got home from dropping off 10 elders in 4 different cities.... it was a long drive.... I only got pulled over twice, so that was a tender mercy. Things are always hectic when 'plans' get made last minute. But learning to deal with last minute changes will be a good skill to have I guess.

We got to watch Sunday's General Conference this week which was cool. Elder Koch's talk was especially fun to see and he hasn't really changed at all! The rest of the talks on Sunday were also really great. I also saw Elder Uchtdorf's talk from Saturday which I also enjoyed. Pedro was a trooper and was at all of Conference! Our newly weds were also there which is great. They are marked for baptism on the 21st, hopefully all goes well!

That's all for this week, I really need to sleep!

Tchau!

Elder Howell

PS: oh, we went to Swaziland which was.... unique.

Another Week Another Transfer

This week was a bit of pure insanity as all starts of transfers are for us. The list of things to do just doesn't fit on a page anymore and we are constantly bouncing around. There was a nightmarish mix of transfers and 3 zone conferences this last week which made our lives overly hectic. But it all worked out in the end (even though the to do list is still 2 pages long and growing). I am alive, my comp is alive and I had an ice cold Fanta today so everything is okay.

My time in the office has probably been the fastest 3 months of my life. The time is flying by (sleep deprivation, tons of work, stress and still lessons to mark and teach seem to make the time disappear). This week a lot of that sleeplessness and stressing paid off with the baptism of Pedro :)  His sister has been a member for 7 years going strong by herself, but now part of her family is there with her. She was SO excited and happy at the baptism. Many many tears of joy for her.

Hopefully here in a few weeks that couple that got married will be getting baptized with their kids. The parents are pretty much ready but they want their older kids to learn everything and get baptized at the same time so we pushed things back a month but it should all work out great!

Thats all for now. Thanks for all the love, emails and letters.... I just got a letter and package from July :0 Yay African mail!

Tchau!

Elder Howell