Hows it? Lacker? (translation: How is everything? Excellent?) How's all the snow? I can't say that I miss it yet. It has been quite hot, but I still like it, probably the novelty of it.
Things are well here. I've had an interesting week. It's been incredible on one hand but terrible and discouraging on the other. We had mission conference this week. Elder Ballard was there. That was incredible! It's basically a one on one thing, I mean, not really, but while he spoke he was asking questions and he was talking directly to me for a while and kept referring back to our companionship. It was just cool. I left there completely pumped about missionary work and about life. But then we came back to Empangeni and back to the discouragement. It has been a discouraging week. We had tons of things planned but everyone keeps dogging us. We had 12 discussions planned this week but only actually taught 3 of them because no one pitched! Frustrating. We were also having some pretty major problems in our companionship. We had a heated conversation last night. Sister Merkley questions the doctrine, rules, the commandments, everything all the time. I've become very defensive to those comments. Even though she is just questioning them to really ponder them and gain a stronger testimony of them. I would get all worked up and up in arms about it. This was causing major contention between us. We also have not been working as hard as we could or should be and she was getting frustrated with the fact that I am not totally self motivated like she is. She does not have the ability to motivate other people and I don't know what exactly I need to do as a missionary, so there were a few things that were being slacked on. It's funny how something can cause so much contention, but if it is just talked about it really becomes no problem. Ahhh, the life of a missionary! :)
This morning we went on a 1 1/2 miles walk through the sugar cane fields. It was rad! I loved it!
Mom, I got 4 letters from you in 1 day! I got the one that you wrote before I even left the MTC! It was kind of funny. It worries me that as of the 1st of Feb you hadn't received a letter. I hope you have by now. I promise I've been writing every week!
Dad, there's a man here. His name is Leon Bruigom. He is wanting to buy some fishing equipment from the states. It is SO expensive here. He might call you sometime and send you some money and have you buy some things for him. I told him you would love to do that for him, make you feel like you were buying it for yourself! :) I hope that's alright. He's really cool! He's an investigator. In fact they are our favorite investigators!
Guess what? There is a lake here, it's the largest man made lake, I think in the world. The dam was cracked and so they send down divers to look at it. The divers never came back, so the put some divers in a cage and sent them down. They got picutres of a 600 lbs catfish!!!! They were amazed! The man who told me about this said that if you go there when there hasn't been a lot of rain and the waters are clear you can see them. They look like submarines. Anyhow, they catch huge catfish there. They also catch them in streams (rivers, I guess) The man is going to get me a magazine with pictures to send home. The one magazine I saw had 3 men with 100 lb catfish. They were huge! This same man - Daniel Vermaak fishes a lot and he is going to catch us some catfish so I can make it! YUM! :)
We just ate at the best restaurant! We just decided to go out and treat ourselves and went to a place called Porky's Family Diner - doesn't sound like anything great, but it is now my favorite place to eat! They really don't have good places to eat here, especially in Empangeni, but this place is great. It's quite expensive though. Well, we actually only spent 5 American dollars and that included fried ice cream, So it's cheap if you look at it that way, but it was 20 Rand.
Thanks for the pictures of Kaity-Shel. She is so cute. I know in the pictures you were trying to show how small she is, but it didn't surprise me much, only because one of our investigator families have twins her age and they are TINY. But Kaity sure is cute. I can already see that she looks like Brittany.
Well, I should probably end. Things are going well here, even though at the beginning of the letter I made it sound terrible. Oh! I almost forgot there is an Elder Jones here that is from Paradise! His parents are Jerry and Sharon Jones. I guess Jerry was Mark's Young Men adviser in Paradise. They are now living in Orem. In fact, just before they moved to Utah, they lived in Don and Linda's old house. Elder Jones says that his dad would LOVE to hear from Mark. I guess he just loved Mark to death. Anyhow, that was a total coincidence! He's really cool I don't remember him at all and he doesn't remember me, but he remembered the last name because of Mark.
Well, thank you so much for your letters. I really do appreciate them. I look forward to going to the post box everyday! :)
I hope all is well. I love you all very much! Thanks for everything!
Love,
Michelle
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