Merry Christmas eh? Last week wasn't too bad. We've been just chillin the last three days and I feel like I'm on a vacation down here. Nothing cool happened during the week, just the weekend. Friday morning we went to our friend Mr. Shoda's house and he taught us how to make rougaille mangue. I had to climb up on top of his creeky little old house in my shirt and tie to get the mangos and it was pretty nuts ha. He was mumbling creole the entire time and laughing at me while I was plucking the mangos and catching them while balancing on his tin roof. I got some sweet pictures, the guy is hilarious and he is never wearing pants. His wife is pretty nice too and they LOVE it when we stop by. Next week we are going to re-wire one of their light fixtures. I'll probably die but it's all good. So after that we had to run to the old Jumbo Score to buy our white elephant gifts for our Christmas party the next day. We bought a jar of shitake mushrooms and a little bottle of perfume called mini sexy. Luckily the exchanging of the gifts wasn't meant to be a spiritual experience haha. It was a good time. So saturday we had our huge Christmas zone activity which was a hike to a waterfall then a movie at the church and the white elephant exchange. Oh and we ate at a sick chinese restaurant. I have pictures of the waterfall and stuff so you can see all that fun stuff. After all the festivities Elder Twitchell and I went back to our apartment and watched our priesthood session DVD and chilled alone on Christmas eve :( It was actually pretty nice. All our neighbors were partying hard and all I could think of was Lehi's dream the great and spacious building across the street while us Mormons studied our scriptures and partook of that delicious fruit ya naw mean. We went to bed at 10:30 and woke up again at midnight when everybody went out and lit up their sticks of dynamite and shook me out of my bed. The fireworks here are crazy loud. I thought there was a riot going on. Sunday morning we got up and took our chairs down to the street corner to use the pay phone to call and that was a good time. Did my voice sound different? The kids are way easy to understand! They speak super clear, it surprised me. Well Shayli still speaks gibberish. Sunday afternoon was pretty sweet, when we got to church President Poncharville asked us if we could speak. So we both gave talks on the fly and it wasn't bad. Not a ton of people were there anyways. After church we went up to the Gahete family's house with the Poncharville's and ate and had a party. We played games like catch phrase and pictionary but it was in french of course. So hard. It was a blast though. Today we are enjoying p day and we have interviews at 5 with president donnelly. Tomorrow we have zone conference and I'm preparing the workshop that we're doing so I probably won't be sending any letters, sorry. Well I got to get going on the pictures so Merry Christmas and happy new year! I love you all!

Elder Barclay