Post Christmas Post

Dear family and friends,

 

Christmas was wonderful! It simply went by too fast. There was quite a bit I liked about it and I'll share what those things are. Keep in mind that I already told most of you this during my call home yesterday.

 

          As I've already explained to some of you, we had a baptism on Saturday (Christmas Eve) and a confirmation on Christmas Day. Holly's baptism went through, which is a HUGE blessing. So on the day of the baptism, around 8 am, Holly's mom gives us a call and says that Holly's been puking her guts out the night before and that we might have to call the baptism off. Elder Adona and I freaked out and hauled it over toward Holly's house on our bikes in 40-something degree weather and gave her a blessing, accompanied by a member of the bishopric who was also the man who baptized her. We gave her the blessing and then told her to call us if she wanted to still go through with it or not. Just prior to the blessing Holly told us how she and her mom were arguing last night at 3 in the morning about cancelling the baptism. Holly was against the idea while her mom was trying to get Holly to cancel due to her sickness. Holly pulled through like the amazing trooper that she is, to our greatest relief, and we had a wonderful baptism. Her older sister told us afterwards that we were "miracle workers" because she did not believe that her little sister could ever be baptized. Hee Hee Hee! I love hearing stuff like that. 

 

       While we set up for Holly's baptism Henry, our other investigator with a baptismal date that I've been telling you all about, was getting his baptismal interview. He passed! And not only did he pass but Elder Stephens (our district leader as well as the missionary who interviewed him) also pulled us off to the side after the baptism and told us how impressed he was about Henry and Holly's interviews and how he was going to bring that up during our next district meeting. That was really cool and very gratifying to hear. Just before Henry's interview (so this is on Friday) we had a lesson with Henry and at the end of our lesson he tells us that he has a surprise for us. He leads us to this room in his apartment and in the middle of this room is a blue 45 gallon drum. He opens the lid to the drum, which is stuffed to the brim with shoes! Oh my goodness he has more shoes than most women do! That's impressive! He then told us to pick any pair of shoes from that drum. Naturally I went for the orange shoes with Asian calligraphy. They perfectly fit my feet too! Yeah they were obviously destined for my feet. The zone leaders who live with us were very jealous when they first saw the shoes. They even texted us during the middle of a lesson with Fred "Hey where are our cool shoes?" Oh that was hilarious! 

 

       Speaking of hilarious there's another story I forgot to tell you all that happened a couple of weeks ago that Elder Adona (my new companion) deems as "an epic part of our companionship". One of our members took us out to an Asian buffet that had baby octopi. Well for those of you who don't know, I hate seafood but I wanted to be adventurous and try it so I could tell you all that I've had octopus. After all, I have tried sushi before in Surprise and I still lived through that so why should octopus be any different? Well it didn't look very appetizing to begin with but what made it worse is that it's head was slit open and it's brains were gushing out. Still determined to perservere I cut a tiny bit of one of its tentacles and ate it. UGH! THAT TENTACLE WAS NASTY! I could barely choke it down. That became the straw that broke the camel's back. It tasted rubbery and fishy and gross! I couldn't even finish the other food I'd taken. I caught some kind of a bug soon after although it wasn't from eating the octopus tentacle. I'm all better now but I felt miserable after that. Elder Adona cracked up when he saw my face after eating the tentacle and now he gives me a hard time about it whenever I bring up something he doesn't like. It doesn't bug me now and I'm grateful that I have another cool mission story to share with everyone. 

 

             A common theme that came up with everybody I called was my new area and my new companion so I'd like to bring it up just to help clarify everything. As Dad pointed out I'm not living in a real ghetto, it's just a very poor area. I keep saying it's a "ghetto" because that's what everybody else told me. I've never been afraid for my life since I've been down here and I've never heard any gunshots, or seen any gangs, around here. However, it's still very poor and I would not want to live here after the mission. It's about 42-45 square miles (this includes the sister's area but our area is far bigger than their area) and it's what President Taylor would call a "bike/bus area" which means that we ride bikes but also use the bus whenever we're doing a lot of traveling. Many of our investigators don't live in houses, and they struggle to pay their bills so it's hard to get in touch sometimes because their phones die. One of our recent converts sell plasma for money and most of them don't even have a car which means that we have to provide a ride for them to come to church. That's the biggest pain since the members have crazy schedules so coordinating the rides isn't fun. Fortunately there's someone in the ward whose specific calling is to set up rides for people. Once we work with her more that will be a HUGE relief off our shoulders. Speaking of all that we had 5 investigators show up to church yesterday. FIVE! That's amazing considering that getting people to church is our biggest struggle. Elder Adona and I are excited for the new week, as well as the New Year.

 

I hope you all had awesome Christmases. I love you all and pray for you every day.

 

Love,

 

Elder Boothe