Attacked by flour and egg

So the weather has been warm here, it's actually quite like a British summer, I can wear my short sleeve shirts, the only problem is that it gets quite cold at nights. But for me, I can take it, wearing shorts for 2 years I discovered the secret of not getting cold. You still get cold, you just don't show it :P But it's all good. Especially because we are walking we feel the weather, luckily it hasn't actually rained, saying that I think it has only rained a couple of times in the past 2 months! Not like back home eh :P

We are walking too, which I really like. I've really grown to like walking areas. We get to talk to many more people and it makes me feel like a proper missionary! Walking with my name tag and everything!

So the work is progressing really well, we have someone scheduled this month, and 5 others in the pipeline for the coming months which is really exciting! They are all solid people too (exception of 1) They are all (almost) adults and are very sincere. But something that I realised and discussed with someone in my group at Zone Conference was that the people who are progressing the most and are on track, are those who we have the best relationship with as they are sincere.

Another experience was that one guy we meet confided in us some serious problems that he'd had with his wife and how things had got quite bad for them (His wife had gone to a Sangoma, witch doctor, and had come back, finding her taking a bath in the blood of a chicken she'd slaughtered..... yeah that happens!) we finished the plan of salvation which he liked and he said that whenever we come he feels happy and good. Leaving the appointment I thought to myself, wow, I really don't have or have had any real problems in my life!

My back, luckily, is getting better. I can now run and it doesn't hurt as much, only when I've been sitting for a long time, like at church. But I've resolved to exercise every morning, and I'm actually getting up early every morning to learn Afrikaans for an hour. I have a book that I borrowed from Elder Benson to learn it from, it's actually very similar to English, apart from the grammar is a lot simpler. So gonna see how that goes. I got the idea from one of the Elders that is dying (slang for going home soon), Elder Clegg. He can speak Afrikaans, Zulu, seTswansa and Spedi, and he's from America!

So we had zone conference on Wednesday which was really nice, I learned a lot from it and it got us going again, then the temple on Friday which I really enjoyed too! It was nice to go to and learn some more which is always nice.

One big struggle we had this week was we were at this teaching appointment with this family, and the mother has been a member of her church forever, now this is the thing, she believes the Book of Mormon to be true, but doesn't see the need to be baptized. I totally respect if people don't believe what we say but to believe part of it only doesn't make sense. We are going back on Thursday with the Bishop.

We are having zone activity next week (4th of July) and they asked me to be the captain of the "British" team because we are going to do capture the flag.

Also, I had someone offer me their child and wanted me to take them to England with me.... so :)

The real disaster actually happened to one of the other Elders. So Sunday night (last night) they were an hour late to pick us up, as it turns out he'd been 'attacked'.

What had happened was that a group of kids had come at them with flour and eggs and basically attacked them. His companion Elder Musiiwa was clean because he'd just ran, but he had gone for the car and got nailed. He had his good suit and an 80% silk tie on.... so he's gonna need to get it dry cleaned. Which while thankfully didn't happen to me, it reaffirmed my resolve to not wear my good suit or tie in the township! 

Township is "crazy"! Especially during load-shedding! (Loadshedding is when the power goes out because there isn't enough. The government gives free power to the houses in the township, but only like 1 power station, so they buy a lot of their power from neighbouring countries, and load-shedding is when there isn't enough power for everyone, so it goes out!) Which means the street lights go out too!

Well that was all for this week.

Take care.

Elder Jack Jorgensen