October 26 letters

Our toilets are normal to answer you first question. At least in our houses. However, almost nobody has real toilets. They usually have little outhouse type things but they don't have seats.  It's just a hole in the ground and they have a bucket of water on the side to wipe your butt with your hand. Most houses have electricity but that one I sent you a picture of last week does not. Neither does it have water. What people do for water here is they have a little tap in their front yard and they fill up buckets and stuff with it. They take bucket showers 100% of the time and wash their dishes on the ground in buckets and hand wash clothes on a rock and whatnot.

This week was really good though and we got a lot of good work done. Nothing really crazy happened this week though. Elder Keck got transferred to an outside area and he is my district leader even though he lives like 1000 miles away. 

I've been doing a ton of work in the branch. This week I organized the home teaching and next week we are going to organize the visiting teaching. Also, I have really been training the secretary how to do all of the financial and mls work. I think I have the church administration manual 2 memorized by now. All the programs and meetings that I organize along with the visits and work of cleaning up the church records. Helping families go to the temple and work on the patron fund. I'll probably have to start communicating with South Africa here in a bit if things continue with the temple family work which would be way awesome. 

Email to Dad from last week that Daniel accidentally sent to someone else:

First things first I think I'll explain a little bit more funny stuff about the planes. We went into the room to go through security in Beira and there was no one there to work the metal detector or anything we called a guy over to check our stuff as we put it through and they weren't even looking. Then, we walked through the metal detector with all of our bags. We literally could have brought a machine gun on the plane had we wanted to the security was that bad. Also, in the Maputo airport things were a little better as far as security goes and they stopped me twice because I had a wooden elephant in my bag and they made me take it out and show them what it was. They thought it was something dangerous even though it was so clear that it was just an elephant. I would take it out and then they would say, "OH elephant ok" it was super annoying. We got transfers today and it turns out that I will be staying here with Elder Brown for this transfer so I'm super pumped. We should be getting a lot of baptisms and marriages.

His language is going well. We only speak English to him because we are always with members going to visits and there are some kids (that one kid that I was eating the cake with) that are always at our house so he chats with them and gets a lot of immersion through that. I dream in a mixture of Portuguese and English. When I pray alone I pray in English but all out loud prayers are always in Portuguese. 

I made these pancakes for him because it was his birthday. We put matches in the top for candles and sang. It was good. The kid I was eating cake with and said was my best friend is this one's brother