Salut, Salit, Salat! 🌍📣

Salut, Salit, Salat! 🌍📣

Antsirabe is still flippin' dope. This week was full of pretty generic work, but rewarding as always. One thing Elder Andriantinarisoa and I had a disagreement this last week about  how many single women we had in our program.  Without a man in the house, we can't enter their house. Consequently, we have dragged our DMB around with us every day in order to teach them. Elder Andriantinarisoa really does love everybody, so it was hard for him to drop a lot of the investigators. Everybody needs the gospel, but we need to teach families and people who will progress.  Some pictures first:

Posh, human chicken.  Didn't really want to hear what our message was though...

• Knowledgeable Nadi: We teach this one family that has 4 generations in one house. The great grandma--who has no idea what's going on, but can still dona (fistbump)--the grandma (Nadi), the father (Billy, Nadi's son) and his daughter. Nadi learned from the missionaries about 10 years ago and actually was baptized. Because of that, she pretends to know everything, which is hilarious. Every time we ask a question, she nods and goes, "Mmhm. Got it," then asks everybody else if they get it yet. When they don't understand, we ask her to explain her understanding. She acts like she can't hear us and pretends to be taken off guard when we ask her to explain, making a very surprised face every time. She usually just says, "Nah, I already understand. Teach them."

• The Package Lady: This last Sunday, this random guy from Utah named Randy showed up to church. He didn't speak any Malagasy or French, so I was like, "Inona ary fanaovanao ety?!" (What the heck are you doing here?!). Then, he introduced me to his wife Domoin, who spoke English better than I do. She's the lady that Mom got in contact with, and she brought the package here to Madagascar! She dropped it off at the mission home in Tana, so it should take a couple more weeks to get to me. Which is way awesome because, when packages are sent normally to Madagascar, first, it takes from 1 month to 6 months to travel here, and second, they are often broken into by the police here, unless there are evangelical pictures of Christ all over the package (they're scared of disrespecting anything religious here).

• Yaw Yeboah Kissi's MTC Story: Elder Kissi is a gigantic man from Ghana (who grew up in New York) who's laugh sounds like a human tuba. Over some rice and loaka, he recounted to me about his MTC fiasco. He wrote on his mission papers that he knew how to fluently speak 5 languages: English and 4 dialects of Ghanian, which is true. Somehow, the MTC class schedulers assumed he was a foreigner that had little knowledge of English and was already fluent in Malagasy. As a result, they placed him in a 2-week course to learn the PMG lessons only in English, then he would be sent straight out to Madagascar with no Malagasy experience at all. He attended that class for a full-week, and then he met the actual Malagasy district on a random P-Day. Thus, he realized he was put in the totally wrong class. He had his flight plans and everything, but they scrambled to switch him into the correct class. It would've been way better story if they never figured it out.

Stories for Next Week:

-Antsirabe's Church Growing Pains

-Stellar Families

-Splits w/ AP's 

-Mangitsy

I need to tell a lot of little stories next week. Love you all! Hope it's going great back in Utah!

Elder Soper