Madagascar Antananarivo Mission: Ambohimanarina, Madagascar Week 16

April 6, 2015

Well, this week seemed to go by faster than most. We have been doing a lot of contacting lately, as usual. The past few weeks it seems as though we have been only been teaching 1st lessons, nothing else. And I assume that it feels that way because in reality we haven't taught anything other than 1st lessons in these past few weeks lol. Also, recently I have been focusing on attempting to improve my language ability. I want to sound like a native Malagasy in my way of speaking and manner of speaking. I don't want to just sound like another vazaha from out of country. This computer has to be the slowest thing I have ever seen or used. I was a bit curious when I noticed that the keyboard and monitor that I am using were plugged into a toaster rather than a computer. I really want to master the Malagasy language, even though it literally has no use outside of this country. It is probably one of the most useless languages in the world though lol. Even in Madagascar you can get around the country just fine if you know French, you don't even need to know Malagsy here.

This past week our zone had a nice little meeting. So it really messed up one of our schedules for the day. The place where we met at was an hour and a half drive from our house as the Taxi Bus drives, and you'd better hope we don't have one of those on our tail. The meeting was fine I guess. I learned a thing or two. It just really messed up our whole day though, we didn't get back to our area until 4 30 PM. We ended up only getting 29 Hours of proselyting time this week because of the Zone Meeting.

Last Saturday I attended the grandest baptism in Madagascar yet. It was the first Baptism in our new building. A lot of people came to support a man named Frere Norbert. He has a position fairly high in the government, and because of that, he has a lot of friends in high-up places. He even gave a fancy invitation to his baptism to the President of Madagascar, he didn't show up unfortunately though. It was also one of the longest baptisms that I have ever attended as well. There was a song or hymn or musical number about every 15 minutes it seemed. The meeting in its entirety was 3 hours in total. There were a lot of speakers present, and they did speak much. It is safe to assume that I may have been just a little bit bored during some points, I never did succumb to the temptations of sleep though, so that is good. Afterwards I worked at a desk with a bunch of LDS pamphlets and Books of Mormon and talked to people that asked about our Church afterwards. We received about 23 names of people who were interested in learning more about our church. Hopefully that means that I will be doing less contacting. There were probably around 200 people at the baptism, if not more. Definitely the biggest I have seen.

Easter was pretty good, we didn't really do anything special, we didn't get to watch conference because we don't have it yet. My companion said it usually takes a month or two to translate to Malagasy and then to give out copies to all of the wards. But I did have a lot of chocolate and candy from my family to eat, so that was good. I do appreciate eating candy and chocolate every meal instead of rice, it is a nice upgrade. Rice... just has no flavor, not my favorite. But yeah, church attendance this week was very low, and probably because all of our investigators went to their old churches this week because they all have big Easter parties. Last Sunday I saw more people go to church in Madagascar than I ever have before, and usually lots of people attend so it was quite a spectacle. Sunday in Madagascar is the one day of the week people actually take showers, wear makeup, and wear nice clothes (anything not dirty with holes is nice here). So it is a fairly nice day here. But last Sunday there were loads of people walking down the streets, taking taxibes, and driving cars to church. Then on Monday they all have big parties to celebrate Easter. The streets were more crowded than I have ever seen before. It was a pretty good Easter.

This computer is really bad so the letter is probably bad quality as well.

Have a good week,

Elder Anderson

Elder Anderson did not send pics this week, the following are from his companion Elder Evans and a mission facebook page. :)

Garbage pile near the police station.