So, this past week has been crazy once again and busy out of my mind, but my companion is learning super quickly and it just seems like he has been an Assistant forever now haha, he is a quick learner and never a Junior companion, he is most certainly my equal and helps out so much! Love Elder Stanford, guy is a boss and we get along so well. He doesn't get up every morning to work out with me, but I get up everyday at 5:40 now and do about 1000+ crunches, 200 or so pushups and then some other ab workouts, and then we went to the gym once last week and my bench hasn't dropped so that is good, and we also went on a run on Saturday and I did well with that too, so I am staying in shape and doing well. We sure do love the protein shakes, and mix our powders together for some pretty tasty shakes haha, so we are enjoying that! Also enjoying today, our cheat day (got him on my diet as well ;) ) and we had like 8 pieces of french toast each this morning, ah life is good!
And Mrs. Casey is most certainly invited to watch Ender's Game with me when I get home and you can tell her thank you so much! I would love if she bought that movie for me. haha, and I can't wait to watch it and read it again and everything, with whatever stinking free time I find, seems like my life back home is going to be as busy as my mission haha, but to be honest, how my schedule looks right now that honestly isn't even possible.
Well...the ebola craze has died down with the missionaries and hilariously is sparking up with the people. NOW they are aware and are all taking precautions, while we just lowered all of ours today and are shaking hands again and eating Free meals and the like, so thats just the way things work with the news here in Sa Lone :)
Well...on to my week! Last Tuesday we had our monthly coordination meeting which was super sweet! Had all the sisters and zone leaders from Freetown for a great meeting and we were able to discuss some sweet topics, even a possibility of having something like sister zone leaders, but nothing for sure yet, but it was a great meeting, and afterwards we took care of some office work, then began what we knew unfortunately would be but shouldn't be an adventure. We left too late, and we knew it, as we walked out the door to the quickly setting sun at 6:30 with our back packs on our backs and 2 mosquitoe nets in a package and our swords (scriptures) held securely in our palms...We were on the way to Wellington to join the Thunderhill apartment for an exchange with the Kissy zone leaders, yeah thats a sentence for ya. As we tried and tried for transport to one of our many destinations, we failed and had to get transport another way and walk a short distance to the next pick up point. So we got taxi, walked about 15 minutes to the poda loading place, and no podas...so we began walking down the super busy/dirty/filthy/ toxic waste dust filled streets towards our destination, praying poda would pass. Many did, all were full, and now the sun was set, so on we walked past millions of people through the dark party streets of the busy part of Sierra Leone, not having any luck with transport, almost completely lost, but we pressed on, walking through neighbourhoods that I might have just curled up and cried had I found myself there without a name tag...but, we felt inspired to jump off that road and head down a sketchy alleyway through pitch black narrow streets and eventually passed through the compound of a giant mosque full of muslims, but we continued until we found the main road and prayers were answered as we found a half full taxi with a taxi man willing to break the law and overload us all in there :) SUCCESS! we then took the taxi about 20 minutes down the road and he let us off too early...so walked another 10 minutes until we met the zone leaders on the street. we were filthy and tired but not depressed and entered into a house of young wonderful missionaries, Elder Rogers (my pikin!), Elder Hamilton, Elder Mphaka, Elder Orchard, and zone leaders Ahrinful and Arikpo. We had a great time and it was so sweet to catch up with my boy Elder Rogers!
Well, Wednesday we had the sweet exchange and had such a great time with the elders. I went with Arikpo up into the Thunderhill areas with the intention of training on finding and teaching families and it went super successful and we were able to find a couple and have some sweet lessons with people! Ended the day early so that we could get home on time, and that still didn't really work as it took us close to 2 hours to get home... might I add that the distance without traffic and the hecticness of Freetown really should be about a 5-10 minute drive haha, very disappointing, poor people here :( its not easy! as they would like to say.
Thursday, up early and back to the streets to hunt for transport and managed to get 2 taxi rides to get to the poda loading area and then ride the poda for an hour and a half to Waterloo to go and do a weekly planning surprise training with the young missionaries and new district leader there. It went super well and we were able to observe, correct and give some good help to these wonderful missionaries to help them be a tad bit more effective, but we were pleasantly graced with wonderful obedient missionaries, so we were very happy. took a good long ride home and managed to get out and teach a couple lessons in the evening, even though we both had dead legs from the stinking poda poda, stupid seats weren't even mounted to the floor haha, then no taxi, so had to walk about an hour and fifteen minutes home and get hit by 2 stinking bike men...tish! but, we were diligent and still went out bloody and diligent :) trying to do our best haha!
Well, Friday morning we got up early and fortuantely found a ride with Bishop Markus to go back to Kissy to go and do a sisters training meeting, so we were surprised to find all the sisters there on time and got to have an instruction with the 8 sisters there, as well as the sister trainer leaders Mukiisa and Povanhu gave brief instruction and it honestly went fantastic. We were nervous the sisters would just shut down and not even respond, but they were all super engaged and optimistic and we were able to help them learn a lot of things they were struggling with. Poor sisters :( nobody trains them on the simple things so they have a hard time when they become leaders but these sisters are all so committed and humble and willing to learn, I love that about them! We went to a nice lil cheap restaurant and got some uh hamburgers? made out of ...uh luncheon meat...yeah, then paid a fine price to get a taxi man to just take us all the way home (not playing with transport anymore)! Then, found out many of the missionaries phones were in danger of shutting off due to not being registered :( so we got a ride into town and went to the Airtel office and I have a woman contact in the back, the manager, who I was able to fight through the huge crowd to talk to her, we engaged her with our mende and were able to get one of their workers to come back to our office with us and register our huge list of phones...problem, when he showed up he didn't have everything he needed to finish the job...so, we taught him the Restoration and sent him on his way :)
Saturday morning, taught a quick lesson in the chapel to Hassan and then got transport into town to go finish the registration. Were able to get this woman to do our short list for us but that took close to 2 hours, and we rushed home to try and salvage the day and teach as much as possible, so we did some weekly planning finally and then made our way out to go and teach some wonderful people and families :) In the evening, during follow ups, one of our best buddies from Bo, Sonaldo, showed up because all the youth there are on a YSA Summit trip to Freetown where a 70 came and addressed them, so he came and visited us and it was so cool to see him again! 2 of my converts made the long trip as well and were enjoying a dance, but Sonaldo isn't into that haha, but he brought Elder Stanford and me 2 pushup bars with our names carved in them that he made haha, that guy is so sweet!:)
Sunday, had a sweet service and then skipped part of our Sunday School to go and visit Belliar Park, where Christiana got up to bare her farewell testimony to leave on mission to Liberia on Friday, my sweet convert who was baptized in November 2012. She is just incredible, the change that she has made in her life just wouldn't make complete sense through email. She was on the bad side of life and everything when we found her and she has just completely reversed. She couldn't even look people in the eyes before, couldn't read, couldn't talk well, just ashamed and shy. Now...stood up in front of 200 people, bore testimony about the truth and divinity of the restored gospel and the Book of Mormon, and threw my name into the testimony like 10x haha which got kinda awkward because everytime she did, everybody in the congregation would turn around and look at me, then turn back haha oh but it was beautiful to see how far she has come. The gospel is amazing...it truly is :)
Well...played some awesome football today so that was a lot of fun. tired and exhausted and going to go get a haircut!! woot woot! life is great and we are balling hard, trunkiness it no daeo, so una go lef for tok dat one! Love you all :)
Love,
Jesse
Elder Sumrak
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