Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Christ the Lord is Risen Today

Area - Sunnyside, Pretoria
Companion - Elder Foote
Letter #22

PRETORIA — Hi there family!  Hahaha so does that mean I get to have 2 Easter celebrations??? :D Joshua Tree sounds like fun! I hope you are sleeping well right now ha. How far is the run to Swami's? like 10 miles? Mom! What a great missionary you are! That's way cool, I hope that they keep coming to church and that missionaries get to teach them.

This week was an alright missionary work week. Usually we have like 24 lessons but this week we only had 7 D: We had many appts but for some reason people kept getting busy or just weren't there when we came. On Weds we did a park and walk day throughout the mission so all we did was talk to people on the street and on thursday the zone had to go to Joburg for interviews with the President so we didn't get to do much that day. But all the rest of the days people just weren't around! Even on Sunday you would think that more people would be at church...nope, less. We only had 5 investigators when we have had 12 plus the past few weeks. BUMMER! This week we are going to turn things around though. We already have many appts stacked up and we still have many people that we can go visit if our plans don't work out. We also have been trying to have a correlation meeting with he ward mission leader for the past month and i am 99% sure that it will actually happen this time. I have never attended a correlation meeting yet...that's not good! This week should actually turn out to be a great week...I'll let ya know next Monday ;)

The park and walk day on weds was pretty interesting. We started walking from the chapel and had a route planned to go near downtown, to a central park kinda thing then back in a big circle to the church and we thought it would take us all day but we got done in few hours. so we went to some nearby neighborhoods after that. We were supposed to contact 20 people by the end of the day and we got exactly that. We had high hopes and that that we would be bale to get 40 people easily but much to our dismay hardly anybody wanted to talk to us! Usually we could stop and talk to anyone or at least if we waved and said hi they would smile and say hi back. That day everybody was just mean ha. But we met a guy from Kenya and he gave us his info so we sent that to the missionaries up there and we also met like 6 other people from surrounding areas so we were able to give a few referrals out to missionaries nearby. We might not have gotten many people to visit in our area but we helped out some other missionaries fro sure! We did find a couple father led families to teach that we are going to visit this week. We are excited for them. We always try to teach father led families so that there can be a strong father in the church leading his family and holding the priesthood. We are always trying to find males to teach because there are tons of females in the church but not enough priesthood holding males to split into more wards etc and fathers are the best! It's weird in some missions you teach anybody who will listen but because it's so easy for us to get people to teach we have to make priorities and sift through so that we are being most effective. In England you could probably visit someone who isn't keeping commitments for a few months or even a year but here, generally it's 3 chances and dropped. Depends on where you are but villages, townships, and city that's how it usually works. Places like La Costa you are gonna hold on to an investigator as long as possible.

I was super excited for Easter yesterday but then it wasn't as great as I was hoping. We weren't able to meet with anybody and it didn't even really feel like Easter. It was weird. Thurs, Fri, and Sat it def felt like Easter and we were teaching about it and helping people understand why we celebrate it and watched The Lamb of God and even the families that we had dinner at we talked about it/shared spiritual thoughts about it and had a mini Easter egg hunt with one of them. So that was good! :D

Well, I hope you have a great week! Get home from you're trip safely I love you all! :D

-Elder Dirkmaat :D

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