Manahoana everyone!! It's that time again! Man I love P-Days. Mondays are the new Friday for me!
Anyways, it's been another good week. I guess I'll start with the baptisms! It was a way cool experience! We ended up having 4 for our branch. Originally it was supposed to be 5, but the father ended up having to go out of town for work... Which was kind of a bummer, but he's still planning to get it done. Maybe this week! Two of the baptisms were kids of one of the counselors to the Branch President. He asked us to teach them before they got baptized. The couple that I was talking about earlier is Mami and Laurence. Laurence and her son were baptized too. I even got to do one of the baptisms! It was for Laurence's son, Rahirinantenaina Gidio Aime (say that ten times fast!). It was so cool to do my first baptism! Well, I mean I've done baptisms for the dead, but to actually be the one baptizing was pretty special. I didn't even mess up on the prayer! Oh and we had the baptism in this little pool thing, you'll see it when I send pictures in a little bit. But yeah, everything went well! And I hope I can be a part of a many baptisms to come. It reminded me about my own baptism 11 years ago and having McWayne baptize me and how special that was. And now I can help people have that same experience. It's amazing to see people take that step of faith.
The language is still going alright. This week I was having a little bit more break throughs with it. Like for one of the lessons we were going over the 6 don't dos in the Word of Wisdom and I was able to help the person understand and remember all of them without really having to think too much about the language. It was pretty cool! The sparks are getting a little bigger. Still can't really understand a whole lot, but I'm able to piece things together more. The whole language learning has been a humbling experience so far. It's weird how back home I kind of just took being able to communicate with people easily for granted, and now I'm in a place where that was taken away from me in a sense and I have to work to get it back. It's a bit of a struggle, but it's also fun learning this crazy language! I can't wait til I'm at the magical point where I realize that I speak Malagasy. Just gotta keep working hard and doing the best I can to get there!
There have been a few lingering animal questions, so hopefully I can clear some things up! Still haven't seen lemurs here. And I probably won't while I'm here in Tamatave. But if I get transferred to Tana in a few months then these emails will flood with pictures of lemurs, I promise! Haha. There's a couple things I forgot to mention before about the animals here. There's stray dogs everywhere. And people here hate dogs.. It's kinda sad! There's a lot of goofy looking chickens around here. People will randomly have geese on their little lots too. We saw a big chameleon the other day! We don't see too many of them here, but they look way cool. It happened to be the one day I forgot to pack my camera... But I'll be prepared next time!
The elections are done! At least as far as we know.. Now everyone is just waiting for the results to come in, which will probably be sometime this week. That's when things might get a little bit interesting... Hopefully things don't get too crazy around here, but if they do we might be on lockdown for a few days. Or worst case be evacuated, but I'm doubting that. We'll just see what happens! But whatever does happen, I know that we'll be safe.
I realized I haven't really talked about the Elders that are in our house! There's six of us. We've got Elder Austin and Elder Jensen who are the zone leaders for Tamatave, Elder Razafamandimby who's almost at the end of his mission, and Elder Morley who was in our MTC group. And my companion, Elder Moulton, of course. Moulton, Austin, and Jensen were all in the same MTC group together and they have about 8 months left. We've got a great bunch of guys and it's fun living with them! It's fun talking with them after getting home from a long day. But yeah, we're all getting along just fine!
Well I don't have much else to say this week. Every day kinda feels the same. Get up and go teach the gospel! That's pretty much what we do. But I'm loving the work here. And all is still well with everything! Anyways, I'll get some pics up. Thanks to all of you for keeping in touch with me! Sorry if I don't get to respond to everyone, but I do read all of them and feel your support. I love you all! Have an awesome week! Tiako ianareo!!!
-Elder Mumford
So... I'm using a different computer this week and it's been weird and I can't find where the SD card shows up in the files on the computer. So they'll probably just have to wait til next week. So I'm sorry! Next week there will be a LOT of pictures, so stay tuned! Love you all!
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