November 19, 2007

Dear everyone,

The week was good. Not too many things out of the ordinary. We have
pretty empty days currently. As always, we are doing a lot of tracting
and finding people and this week we found and taught 3 different
families, which is pretty exciting.

Friday morning we did a service project at Sandra Mboma's house (the
nurse/investigator I told you about last week). She lives in a pretty
nice area and has a lot of hedges that needed trimming, so Elders
Ulloa and Mugwandia, and Tibagalika and myself took a few hours out of
our day and cleaned up her yard. She came to church again yesterday
and was participating in the classes and everything. She will be a
powerful member when she is baptized in a few weeks!

Saturday we were supposed to teach the muzungu and his family again
but he had gone out of town suddenly so we rescheduled. While we were
there it started raining cats and dogs so we stayed there and talked
to the wife and children for a bit. Her name is Thandiwe and she
speaks English, Nyanja, Bemba, French (Canada), Swahili (Congo),
Chinese, and Indonesian! I thought that was pretty amazing. So we'll
teach them probably this weekend.

Yesterday at church we had a slight surprise. To be completely honest,
we really weren't expecting any investigators to come, but just barely
after the meeting started two investigators whom we had "dropped"
earlier in the week came. They were two sisters whose nephew was
baptized in another branch and we've been teaching them since the last
eternity and for whatever reason they just haven't been keeping
commitments so when they weren't home when we came for our appointment
this week we decided we would wait to find them if they came to
church. And they did! So it was a pleasant surprise. The meetings were
very good and they felt the Spirit so we hope that gave them the extra
boost they need to keep their commitments.

For everyone's information, no, they don't celebrate Thanksgiving in
any form here. BUT if I'm not mistaken there is a Thanksgiving-like
holiday in South Africa which takes place sometime in October each
year. Notwithstanding here in Zambia there is KULIBE (nothing).
Because we have 10 or so Americans in this zone, we're all having a
thanksgiving dinner tonight at the Woodlands branch meetinghouse,
complements of President and Sister Sanford. I hope we'll have turkey.
. .

I hope you all have a wonderful week! I love this gospel and know that
it comes directly from our Father in Heaven!

Nalikukonda (love you),
Elder Mckay Moline