Mada adventures- weather, animals, and kids!

It's burning hot here. Holy crap. I hope you all are enjoying the fall time back home, I'd kill for that right now. Rainy season is definitely starting to hit here. Nothing too bad yet. We had a solid rainstorm on Wednesday, then again of Friday morning (way too early I might add, got to love tin roofs). Then last night we had another storm with tons of lightning. Lightning was striking all over. One hit way close, I seriously went blind for half a second.

Anyway, that aside, haha, we got our new Elder in the house this week. His name is Elder Hamm, he's from Granstville, UT. He's still just a little bit shellshocked I think, but weren't we all? We took him to the lemur park today. Oh, and we had some fun stuff happen there.  Outside the lemur park, there is a little village where people sell chickens, and we got one for way cheap, and they told us to go feed it to the crocodiles, because I guess that's what they eat. So we took it in, gave it to the cage cleaner guy and he threw it in the cage. I'll save the dirty details, but it goes without saying that we saw some crazy crap go down in the crocodile cage today.

Also, unrelated to carnivorous animals, we also found a random school in the middle of nowhere with like 200 kids running around. We rallied them up, and their teacher had them sing a song for us. Then we had them repeat back English phrases to us, I got a video of like 50 of the kids saying "I love Taylor Swift". That should win her over eh?

With Elder Lane Mitchell in Madagascar

Some random things I observed this week. The following all happened to me in a matter of like an hour or so on Friday.

-I was walking to our area, when I large spray hit me in the hand, snot rocket from the guy in front of me.
-I was walking in a little alley between two houses and I saw a bright blue bucket full of water. Along with several pieces of human poop.
-I was walking through a courtyard when a huge goose started chasing me up a dirt hill.
-By an epicerie (a little one room store) a drunk guy walked up to me and told me that I looked exactly like his favorite American actor. Turns out his favorite American actor is only in French movies. So I guess I'll never know who that is.

It's all good fun out here, you never know what kind of weirdness will go on. Oh, and I also decided to test out our water filter bottle this week. It's supposed to be some souped up filter on steroids. So I filled it up out in Manazary with some water by where everyone was washing clothes. Tasted like smoke and dirt, but my body is feeling fine, so I think the bottle works.

We were walking home last night when we felt like we should visit our old EQP, we'd never visited him before. We had a member lead us to his house then we walked in, shared a thought, talked forever, played guitar, ate dinner, and he drove us home. DROVE US HOME. That never happens. I felt like an American missionary, getting free dinner, a ride home, and he also invitied us to come play tennis with him on our next P-Day is his private court. He's loaded. I still don't know exactly why we felt like we should visit him. I think he had some not so good experiences with missionaries before, but things seemed way good by the end of the night. He was pretty weirded out when we first showed up.

Let's see what I can whip up about these investigators. Keep in mind that what I say is just highlights, everyone has a more full story than what I write. 

Voary and Hiaingo, we still teach them. I'm really hoping they get diligent again. They were really good at first, but they've kind of slowed down, and aren't home a lot. We'll see.

Lydia, she's still a go for baptism soon! She has to get legally married, but that should be easy because she works for the gov. Valdy is her son, haha. But I made that mistake when I first got here with some kids. A lot of kids look like they could be either until you get used to it. I'm usually right 90 percent of the time haha.

Lanto, she is already baptised. She is a less active we were trying to get back to church. But she's having a rough time finding work and is having a hard time believing that if she comes to church, she'll find work. We keep promising her that.

Ernestine and Aiena, WAY diligent. We're teaching them twice a week now. Way awesome. We've only taught them twice and we gave them a BOM and the first thing they asked was why it didn't have D&C and Pearl of Great Price too, ha. We picked one up for them today. I have no doubt they'll be baptized in the next month or two. Our focus with them is getting their husbands to learn with them.

The guitar is way cool, but it's way different than the one back home. That one is way better, but I expected that. This one is still a good one to have to play so I don't lose all my skill haha.

Misaina was teaching me some tricks on the guitar.

Sorry, not much organization to this letter haha, but I just noticed a ton of random things this week. Thought I'd share them.

Talk to you all soon!

Taylor