07 January 30--Progress

Hello, hi and how are ya?,

This week was a long one. It's all down in the journal, so I'll have to tell all about it after the mission. But to give you an illustration, on Saturday, our first 7 set appointments didn't go through (but we did have a nice last appointment at least). But that's kind of how this whole week has been. We also got to see Jaqguy get baptized this week, which was nice ( if you remember last week's E-mail, Jaqguy is one of my first guitar students in this country). I got stuck with, er.. was privileged to give a talk on the Holy Ghost after the baptism. It actually went ok, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous out of my mind. All of the notes and scriptures I had written were useless to me because when I got up to the pulpit, I was so nervous I couldn't read English anymore. So I just talked about the Holy Ghost and read some scriptures as they came to me. After the talk, all of the Malagasys told me how much they liked the talk. This was good because Malagasys have a way of telling you just how terrible at something they think you are. Like when I first got in the country, and bore my testimony in Malagasy for the first time, afterwards I had two different ladies give me a piece of paper showing me all the mistakes I had made to "Help" me get better, and the rest of the branch said stuff like, " tena tsy mahay tenin' i Gasy ianao!" (you're really not good at Malagasy at all are you!). It was pretty funny. Anyway, after my talk at the baptism, the positive comments were hopefully true. I also got to bless the sacrament in Malagasy for the first time yesterday, which I actually enjoyed. If you had showed me the words " Andriamanitra, Rainay Mandrakizay O" (Oh God, the Eternal Father) before my mission, I would have asked you " what kind of crazy language is that?", and now, it is the most familiar to me besides English and doesn't sound weird to me at all, funny how that works.

I'm having a lot of fun with my companion. I think Micaela and Phil would really get along with this guy, he kind of reminds me of all of their good friends. And he lives in Maryland. I've been really lucky to get along with all of my companions, and none of them are anything alike. So that's been a nice thing for me on my mission.

One of the reasons this mission is so cool is because it's so small, in that there is only 50 missionaries, so we all get to know each other pretty well. I'm excited to hang out with some of these guys after the mission. It will be like a little subculture of white Malagasy speakers, and nobody will have even a clue of what we're talking about.

In other news, we have found an Indian restaurant comparable to Bombay House. Yeah, I'm happy about that. And as long as we're talking about food, my companion and I made an incredible roast yesterday, it was so good, it helped us feel a lot better about the slow week we'd just experienced. We also finally got our guitars this week, and they are really nice. Unfortunately, for how long we've been waiting for these guitars, unless they turned out to be like a Les Paul, I was setting myself up for an anticlimax. The experience of actually picking up the guitars was a little trying on my patience. When I got there, some lady said that we should give them a tip for how nice the guitars were, when we were thinking that, considering they should have been done in a week, and we had waited 2 and a half months for them, we should have gotten a discount ( we payed top dollar, and these guys weren't exactly poverty stricken anyway), so I kind of had to hold my tongue when she mentioned the tip (because there was also the implication that because we're white, of course we have the money). Also, I had to spend the next hour playing all of the guitars and pointing out all of the flaws that needed to be fixed ( there was alot) before we took them home. But we have the guitars now, and they are nice, so everything's good now.

There is hope for the upcoming week. We're hoping that we'll get more of our appointments to go through this week, and we just barely got an investigator that looks like a "golden" one. We'll see. But for now, I'm out of time, so until next week, Veloma!
Elder Draper