Thanksgiving is a Holiday

Bonjou Fanmi ak Zanmi mwen yo! Kijan semen ou pase? Tout bagay enfòm, wi. (Have fun with that Google Translate. If there's one thing about Creole that I've learned it's that spelling literally has no meaning, as long as it makes the right sound it's all good.)

Google Translate: Hello Family and Friends my! How you spend weeks? Everything informal, yes.

Mom translation of translation: Hello my family and friends! How was your week? Everything cool, right?

​Me in my Pday tie.​

This past week was a little slow, not gonna lie. We don't have anyone we're teaching right now, all the cool referrals we had were dropped because we couldn't contact them anymore. So now we're doing lots of knocking. We found a big apartment complex where like literally everyone is Haitian. I've been practicing some Creole door approaches, which is good. 

I feel like my language skills are slowly improving in general, both English and Creole. It's hard to talk to strangers about the gospel in general, and to not sound boring and lame (a particular struggle for me :) ). Another thing I've learned too is that the Gift of Tongues is not only for learning a new language, but also being able to communicate in your native language. I had one experience where we were teaching a lesson to Nasya, a young single mother (our only lesson with her), and she was asking us why the Bible was harsh and condemning sometimes. If God loves us shouldn’t the Bible give me peace? And without thinking really I told her "The Bible is harsh sometimes because God loves us, it's like as if he's our own father and we're a little kid running around about to touch a hot stove and he says DON'T TOUCH THAT! He's not mad at us, but it's because he loves us so much and knows that what we're doing will hurt us." That seemed like exactly what she needed to hear, and the Spirit was there.

Last Sunday Frè Tony (an active Haitian member of the ward) recruited Elder Lund (and therefore me as well) to help him play the piano for a little Haitian Christmas choir, even though he hasn't played in literally 10 years! Frè Tony didn't care though, he was just like "But you played 10 years ago, so you'll do it?" Haha. What's probably gonna end up happening is Elder Lund and I will each learn to play one of the songs on the piano. That'll be interesting. We haven't had a practice yet but we spent a chunk of last Pday practicing the songs at the church, and will probably do more after we email today.

So apparently Walmart doesn't believe in Thanksgiving or something? Walmart here is like the main thing- tons of people all day long and practically its own police force. They've had Christmas decorations up for the past few weeks now. No mention given of Thanksgiving or anything. They even have a big sign that says "34 days till Christmas!" But I guess it's all good because I bought myself Egg Nog today. That's some good stuff man.

Yesterday the other Elders had a baptism! Stephora is a girl they've been working with for a while, she's cousins with an active Haitian family in the ward and wanted to get baptized. There was a bit of a struggle with Frè Chauvet, who was performing the baptism, forgetting the words to the prayer and just making up his own words. Elder Child had to stop him a few times and restart. He was going off about it later at home, "He made up his own words!!" So that was kinda funny. I stood in the confirming circle and gave the closing prayer, so that was fun. Afterwards there was a big linger longer with awesome turkey and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie for the whole ward, and they gave us containers to bring some of it home with us. That's gonna be great. I want to lose weight though, so if anyone knows of some good low carb-low sugar-low fat-low calorie-cheap-easy to make meals that'd be great. Also send me song titles, it's so hard to think of normal songs these days. I might end up stopping the song translations. But until then...

Here's some lyrics for ya:

"M ap chante nan lapli, jus chante nan lapli!"

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The other Elders' phone broke, so we invented the "GettoPhone."
We rubber banded a Bluetooth speaker to notify of calls and a portable headphone jack speaker to hear the other person talking.
It was super funny, that's Elder Child modeling it off.​

The mission got a prototype of the iPhone 8! We, however, have the GettoPhone.

Some random crazy looking birds I saw while cleaning the car.

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Lanmou,

Eldè Stevenson