Yeah!

Hey homies :) Another solid week. My trip to Reunion was amazing. So after I emailed you last Monday I went out on splits with Elder Fennell and Elder T. They said we were going to visit a less active that lived above the Gonthier's (my favorite people on reunion island) so I asked if I could just stop and say hi and they said sure... So I rang the doorbell and turns out that they had set up a dinner with them just for me. Melanie (Soeur Gonthier's nonmember friend that we used to teach) was there and she was pumped to see me as well. It was awesome. I didn't think anyone would remember who I was. We had a way good meal and had a way fun time talking about all the good times we had when I worked with them. After we taught the lesson Soeur Gonthier went and got a present that they had bought for me. I almost shed some tears! Man I love those people, they bought a sweet book about Reunion that wasn't very cheap. I was touched ha seriously it was hard not to hug them all. So after that we went to visit all the recent converts that I had taught as investigators. We saw my boy Mason Juldas first and he is still his kreole gangsta self, but now he's a kreole latter day saint gangsta reppin the Mormons out in the streets. He was way fun to visit and teach. So that was all Monday night. On Tuesday We went to Onja's house. She was out on her deck waiting for us to get there when we showed up. She made a huge lunch for us. The food was soooo good. She is as solid as ever. I taught her a spiritual thought in Malagasy and it was sick! I can't explain the feelings I have for all these people. Man... We took some fun pics that you guys will like haha. So that was pretty much it. I got to see Elder Twitchell and Elder Long as well as the sisters. It was hard to leave back to Mada. I had the time of my life and got to see the fruits of my labors. I also got my french visa renewed just in case a transfer comes up and I need to get bounced back over there. Only President and the AP's know what the future holds haha. I just want to get good at whatever stinking language I'm speaking. Malagasy is coming quick now Elder El-Bakri is helping me sooo much, mostly because he just stops talking during the lessons and doesn't start teaching again until he thinks I have tried enough haha. I just go for it and sometimes I do way good and other times people are like, "Ohh cute... he's trying to speak Malagasy..." The other day I taught the majority of the 2nd lesson. I was proud of myself. The rest of the week was routine. This morning we went souvenir hunting. If you have any requests or ideas, let me know because I'm going to be blowing some cash here at the end of my mission for you guys. The only problem I really have in my life right now is that my companion is going home to America next week. Lucky piece of poop haha. It takes every ounce of energy in me to not get trunky... Church is the worst, I have had some pretty graphic daydreams of me coming down that escalator in the SLC airport during sacrament meeting the last couple of weeks. Don't worry though I'm still scared of my mission ending. Well That's about it for me talk to y'all next week!

Elder Barclay

What’s up friends,

Here I am back in La Réunion with my boys Elder Fennell and Elder T! So the dealio is... I had to leave Mada for a day in order to get my permanent visa so here I am. I just met the Heaps and they are sooooo sick! I'm kind of bummed that I don't get to work more with them. So let’s talk about this last week. We have been running around trying to find doctors to arrange an Elder's surgery next week, he's getting his tonsils out... yikes. So that took all day Monday. Then on Tuesday we had a sweet zone leader council and now I remember that I wrote about this on Wednesday. Whoops so from Wednesday on. Uhhh... Yeah ha nothing has really happened since then. We had another super sweet lesson with Hery and Yarisoa. We did however have to push their baptism dates back to September 2nd. It was super tough because they could get baptized tomorrow and be fine and they would stay active, but we're working hard to help people understand everything. Isn't that how you think it would always be? Make sure your investigators are as ready as possible before you baptize them right? Ha nope that's not quite the mentality, well at least it wasn't but now it's changing and I love it! Elder El-Bakri is sooo good at teaching and he speaks so clearly that people get it and feel the spirit and become converted. I'm so lucky to have him as a companion! He has helped me a ton with Malagasy as well, but anyways I don't have a ton to tell you except that tomorrow we will be trying to get me another French visa... ha... yep... but nothing is sure! So I'm going to just start sending you guy’s pics and stuff and I'll write more next week! I love and miss you all!

Love Elder Barclay

Well howdy,

Super nuts week (and a half). Soooo we'll start off with Antsa's baptism. I got to do it and I got it on the first try (thats a rare thing when someone’s name is Rajafindrala Antsa Idealy). The water was ice cold and she was squirming like crazy haha she's the cutest! As for news with Hery and his family, they are still golden as ever. To start our lesson off I asked, "What's new?" Hery was like, "I'll tell you what's new, I went to your church and I've been reading the Book of Mormon and my family and I will be getting baptized on the 18th." Yep sure ya are :) haha He told us all about the overwhelming emotions and feelings that came to him when he was reading and he knows everything is true. Hooray for Israel. Some bad news is that our other family (Jimmy and Angeline) is moving out of our area :( They are still solid and our last lesson was pretty eventful haha. I'm not very good at Malagasy but I try my hardest to teach and I was teaching about agency and the fall of Adam and Eve when Angeline started breast feeding. I see that kind of thing every day and it has never even phased me but this time I couldn't handle the situation. Angeline is kind of an odd shaped woman; we'll leave it at that. So when she started my brain stopped working and I wasn't making any sense at all and just kept speaking absolute gibberish. This story is only funny if you speak Malagasy but I was mixing words up like "car" and "authority" and everyone was looking at me like I was an idiot, because... I am.

Luckily nothing bad came out of my mouth. We also had transfers this last week. Woohoo. It was kind of nuts because a lot of people moved around and I had to organize it all. We have a giant van/bus that I was driving around all day picking up and dropping off people at bus stations and apartments and the office. It was a bit of a rodeo but we got it all done and it went rather smooth if i don't say so myself :) The van has some GITTY UP! By far the fastest and most powerful car in the fleet ha. We had a zone leader council on Tuesday all morning and it was a real boost. We talked about real growth in the church and instituted some new things we are going to be doing with our investigators before they get baptized so we can up the retention here. It was a really powerful meeting and President Adams taught us some leadership stuff. He talked a lot about how hypocrisy destroys your credibility as a leader and that if you are practicing what you are preaching then the spirit and power of the priesthood will impress upon those you are leading and they will follow you. It was really cool because as he taught us the concept, it happened. The spirit confirmed what he was teaching us and the power of the priesthood was manifested in the meeting. There wasn't a chance that anyone in that room wasn't on board to do whatever he was asking us to do because it was such a powerful meeting. That's about it for this week. Mom I got the package and you put everybody else's mom's to shame because mine was so big. You're the greatest! I love you all, have a sweet week!

Elder Barclay

Hey.

Great week, great week. We taught a member referral on Tuesday and then again on Saturday. I love GOLLLDDDD.... The father's name is Hery and he has two kids and a wife who are prepared as can be. On Tuesday we taught a normal first lesson and answered his questions and listened to him tell us that every other church was false as we nodded our heads and said yep you got it. So when we went back on Saturday he had read our pamphlet and answered all the questions in the back and then studied the definitions in the glossary. Haha mmhmm, yeah sure. He explained to us the difference between the Aaronic Priesthood and the Melchizedek (I don't know how to spell that in english) Priesthood. Haha so! We taught him some more about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and asked him to be baptized on August 18th. He then told us about an experience he had 2 weeks earlier. He had been listening to missionaries from another church and one night he had a dream in which he was told to send those missionaries away. Then He started to keep EVERY commandment and then we showed up and it felt right. Yeah! The guy is going to be a stake President I swear! He has taken bible courses and knows the book inside and out. He came to church on Sunday and it was a success. We have another family that accepted baptismal dates for August 26th. Jimmy and Angeline are their names. Angeline's little brother and her mom are down to take a dip too. So things are going good. We're baptizing an old members grand daughter this Saturday that we have been teaching and then on August 4th we have a 17 year old girl named Larissa getting baptized. Last night transfer news was released and Elder Bates is going to Tamatave and I get Elder El-Bakeri who goes home in August in the office with me. So I'm guaranteed at least two more months in the office... I love it! Poor Bates has to miss out on all the baptisms we have coming up. This will be the first time that I stay in the area with all the baptisms and my comp gets transferred. The office is kind of getting old though... but I'm way glad that I get to keep working closely with President, the AP's, and the office couples. I'm so lucky! That's about it for this week. Solid. Until next time my friends!

Love Jeff    

Hey errbudddy,

This last week was AWESOME! Tuesday Elder Bates and I were out walking to one of our lessons when Elder Cusick called me to ask if he could still get ladies if he didn't have an appendix. I said, "Not if you die because some Malagasy uses the same butcher knife he uses to cut up his cow head to cut you open." Well Wednesday night I found myself at the hospital with Tregagle, Bates, and d Cusick. Cusick had just come out of surgery and he was higher than a kite. I think we got a solid 2 hours of straight comedy recorded on our three cameras. Who knew getting high enables the gift of tongues; Cusick was going off in French, Creole, Malagasy, English and sign language. The nurse got the whole first lesson yelled into her ear along with emphatic hand gestures and a little spit. So because Cusick was in the hospital recovering he wasn't able to go to Tamatave with President to meet the missionaries out there and go to the sickest lemur park in Madagascar :) your boy got hooked up and got to take his place and go. The drive there was not pleasant one bit. There aren't any freeways here, just the smallest windy roads you have ever experienced and after 5 hours your insides are about as jumbled as can be. We got to the park around 4 p.m. and went and saw the crocodiles and then checked into our little banana tree bungalow. For the evening we drove around checking out super fancy hotels and restaurants with President and Sister Adams so they could plan for their future trips. At the last fancy restaurant we ate... Yeah buddy. The next morning bright and early we got breakfast at President's hotel (fancy buffet style) and then took our canoe across the river to get to the island of lemurs. They attack you as you step out of the canoe and crawl all over you. It was probably one of the craziest feelings I'll ever experience. After we had seen all the lemurs on that island we got back in the canoe and paddled upstream to see the ring tailed species on the other island. This email is not doing the justice that this story requires. I got tons of pics and videos but still even that won't do, ya just had to be there.Don't worry, President was in the canoe next to us the entire time. I'm not a disobedient missionary. So that was nuts and awesome. We hit the road again and went to the coastal town of Tamatave and got to work with the missionaries out there. It is sooooooo sick there! Total beach town and just chill as ever. There are 10 missionaries out there and it is hot and humid like Reunion. Sand EVERYWHERE. The people are laid back and nice and bras and clothes are optional, actually I'd say they're frowned upon ha. So that was a bit of a bad deal but hey we deal with what we have to haha. There aren't taxis and busses, but pouse pouses. They're actually bicycle pouses and that's how we get around. Just whip out 50 cents and you're cruisin to your destination. One of the drivers we were talking to tried to rip us off (he wanted like 4 bucks, pffft yeah right) so I had him sit in the pouse with Tregagle and I drove. Everyone that saw me sweating and pedaling was dying. I literally was the first white man they had ever seen pulling a malagasy around in a pouse. Splits with the elders out there was the funnest part of the trip. All the houses are on stilts about 2 or 3 feet off the ground and the roofs are banana leafs. Bungalo would be what you call these cribs. I really hope I get transferred out there. So that was the trip. On Sunday we went to church out there and then drove back to Tana... :( It's good to be home, kind of. Poor Elder Bates had to hang out in an apartment with Cusick the entire week, while Tregagle and I were chillin in Tamatave. How lucky am I right? The downside of all of this is that our area didn't get worked at all. However we called our ward mission leader last night and we had 15 investigators at church. Of course when we take a vacation from work everyone keeps their commitments but the week before when we bust our butts 2 people show up to church. I'm happy that they came though ha I'll take it! Yeah... awesome week, adventure central. Gotta go, love y'all!

Love Jeff   

Man sorry about last week. Well I'm not sick anymore thanks to a nice

day of rest on Tuesday. Monday night we got a call from the Gray's and we had to meet some zone leaders at the office at 9:30 p.m. Elder

Vonjy had some throat problems and needed to go to the hospital so we went and chilled with President Adams until about 1 a.m. at the

hospital. Poor vonjy had a knife shoved down his throat to slice open an infected ball of puss and blood. I almost threw up. So I was on hospital duty all Tuesday with him. I sat in his room all day and listened to the lady that was in the room with us gag up loogies and throw up for 12 hours. I've already told you how nasty hospitals are, so spending half a night and a day in it won't be my most cherished memory. Nothing else crazy happened until Saturday. We had a baptism, Jean Louis is his name. 50 year old man haha solid as ever, he paid tithing before he was baptized. The baptism was kind of a mess though because the branch didn't actually do anything they said they would to prepare the baptismal service. So on our way back from the airport Saturday afternoon I was prompted to check if everything was being taken care of. We called the branch President and sure enough nothing was getting done. So we made some calls and got stuff organized and then ran to the church to work on getting the font filled. I went and found some buckets out in the garage and started filling them with the hose outside. We got it done! The baptism was solid except for the fact that the Branch President was an hour late ha. Oh well. One detail I left out was during the trip from the airport to the church. We got pulled over by one of the top notch police officers here in Madagascar. So we gave him our info and while he looked it over we searched for some change that we could bribe him with. All we had were big bills, so Bates says, "Do you have any idea who we are?" The cop looked at us and said, "Who are ya?" "Well my fine sir, we're missionaries!" Says Bates haha and after a few back and forths the cop said, "Pray for me fellas!" and off we went, free of charge. Haha you wouldn't believe what you can get away with here. Yeah... So that was about it. We have some solid families that we teach but no one is coming to church. It's pretty frustrating. I'm still not good at Malagasy. The real ticker is that people don't hesitate to ask why I'm not fluent yet and then they say, "Well learn!" Oohhhh.... ha silly me! What have I been thinking this entire time?! Duh I guess I should get on that and start studying and stuff. This is one of the most difficult/frustrating things I have ever attempted to do. Soooo If you could pray for me to receive the gift of tongues that would be cool. I might break someone’s nose the next time they tell me to learn. Well my friends that’s it for me! Have a good one, I love you all.

Love Jeff

Well I'm sick, this computer doesn't work and now I have no time left to tell you what’s up ha. I fed a chicken to a crocodile this morning and President Adams got here on Saturday. Awesome guy. Donnelly is gone and that was tough but whatever, I'll see the guy again. Ten months right? See ya soon :)