"The Magicianary": Oct. 31, 2011

Hello!!! Hello!!! Hello!!! How is everyone?! I hope everyone is having or had a great, fun Halloween. Here in Mada, absolutely no one celebrates it! But they definitely know about it, because everyone takes work off for it :) And that is the one reason why we didn't get mail today :(

This last week we had a couple meal appts. with members. Since Goff is dying in 18 days (ending his mission) everyone wants to have soirèes with him. Even though Malagasy food is not bad, its not the best either... don't get me wrong, it's great to get so much free food, but when you eat rice for dinner a few days in a row it gets old. But I will accept any food a member or investigator gives me, since it is such a big sacrifice of money and time to prepare it.

I have decided that the people here in Mada are the coolest people on the earth! I was on splits with Elder Bates and a member, and we took the member's car to this way far away place to go teach and tract. I don't think some of the poeple there have ever seen a white person before in their life. They are extra surprised when they see us. But after we teach one time out there we decide to go tracting before our next appt. and we walk up to this house and an old grandma is just hanging up wet clothes on the clothesline to dry and we start to talk to her and she is just staring at us doing nothing. (Malagasys are good at staring by the way, its hard to beat a Malagasy in a staring contest, trust me) But then this man comes out and he is just so happy and surprised to see us and then he just runs back in the house. We wait for about 2 maybe 3 minutes just trying to talk to the grandma while the way excited guy is in the house. Luckily he comes out again and invites us in. We sit down and are just talking and he is still smiling the whole time. After we finish teaching he said that he has been hoping for people like us to teach him about Christ. He was way excited about the gospel and the Book of Mormon. So we gave him a Book of Mormon and some homework to read. He seems way cool and I can't wait to teach him again.

The member that went with us used to be a pastor of the Adventist church. He was first taught in 2004 was kinda hesitant about the gospel but eventually came around to it and got baptized a year ago. Now he is a ward missionary and is helping us out a ton. When we bring him to teach he kinda still teaches like a pastor, using rhetorical questions and being really animated. He is fun to have around :) The members in my ward are legit. They help out so much and are just amazing in every way! It could basically do missionary work by itself if it wanted to.

So we had a soirèe yesterday night and we went over to this member's house. We had a blast, we played UNO and other card games. But... the choice of food was spiders!!! They are not that bad actually, as you can see in the picture they were cooked with tomatoes and oil :) The worst part for me was just holding it in front of me face right before I eat it. So I just had to pop it in my mouth. When I bit down I could feel all the guts, the legs felt like fish bones that were really soft. But of course the first one I had was too small so I ate a second bigger one. It was a good experience but I think that will be a one timer. But now I can say I've eaten spider!

To explain the last pictures, today we went over to this member's house and had a lunch soirèe. The father owns a Bank of Africa which is the biggest bank here. Their house is huge! They had maids and like four cars and little mini ATV's. It is probably the closest thing to America I'll ever see. They fed us grilled chicken, fried chicken, fries, other stuff and of course, rice. It was really tasty. That humongeous fat chicken you see is from Australia apparently, they wanted it so bad they had it imported. It is a beast and I had to take a picture of it, it runs so funny. It has to move its legs weird 'cuz it has so many feathers.

- Did you end up playing for the mission FHE? I did not, but Pres. Donnelly wants me to play for them sometime, so we'll see.

- How is your new area? I love it, part of it might change into it's own group cuz it's so far away from the church.

- Is the accent any different in Ivato than it was in Tamatave? It's not really an accent, it's more of a different language. The same one that I learned in the MTC, so it was a little easier to understand when I first got here.