Preparing to meet Elder Holland

Hello family,

How was your week? Mine was another good week. We got a lot accomplished. The beginning of the week started out great. We got the whole apartment clean, spic and span, on Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday were great and then there was Thursday! What a good morning, not! The generator broke, the toilet broke and a sink broke. So my morning was busy. Luckily, I am pretty handy so I got it all fixed. It is just not something I like to do in a white shirt on a proselyting day. I had the toilet all torn apart and the sink was broken and the generator was apart and the senior couple wanted to drop off some stuff, like tracts and, lucky for me, they decided they wanted to do an apartment check. I was like "oh come on. This place is normally the cleanest place in the entire missionand the day you come check everything, it is destroyed." Anyway, I got it all fixed, after running around Bo trying to find the parts. It blows my mind how everyone has a generator but no one sells parts for it. And when they do have it, they try to charge me an arm and a leg for it because I am a white man. But then I start talking boldly in Krio and they shut up real quick and give me the real price. I have to be really careful on what I spend money on because they just gave us a lecture on wants and needs, which kind of blows my mind because we are in AFRICA. It's funny how sometimes they think we want too much. I don’t know what else they want me to give up. I think I have given it all. I guess I could eat nothing in the day and wash my cloths by hand with no soap - no, it's cool. I understand that I can live pretty cheaply now. Missionaries here do kind of take advantage because there is this Americana restaurant and they sell real American food so every once in a while they go and eat there. So they told us now that we have to record every leone we spend and what we spend it on. We have to be careful how we spend our “consecrated funds”.

The weekend was busy. I did a lot of interviews which results in a lot of baptisms. The problem is the branch funds have had a hold on them because the old branch presidents liked money too much and they thought they needed it for themselves. So the church stopped that. So the crappy thing is we have to fill the font by hand because they don’t have money to run the generator and the pump. The font is probably only around 6-700 gallons when full and about 100 yards away from the pump. That was fun. The way it works is a hand pump and buckets. After about four hours and lots of sweat, we got probably about 500+ gallons in the thing. That was good exercise. I pumped for 2 hrs without stopping. Then I carried lots of buckets. Needless to say, it was a humbling sacrifice for our beloved investigators. We had a beautiful baptism consisting of 23 souls coming into the fold, followed by their confirmations on Sunday. The happiness you feel when all is done really cancels out all of the suffering that we have to go through.

As for the mission work, things are going great! We have some good people preparing for baptism and lots of paperwork and other things to do to try to keep the church in order. I am hoping the church doesn't go up in flames considering we wont be there Sunday because we will be in Freetown with Elder Holland. They will probably start the service sometime around 10:15 when it is supposed to start at 9. They will do what they want because we won't be there. Right now all the missionaries are gearing up to meet Elder Holland. We have been cleaning our dirty yellow shirts as white as we can get them, getting our hair cut ~ you know, the whole shabang! We are hoping to get him to talk about us in the next general conference! It is pretty funny to see all my “Nealehle” brothers gearing up to see their first general authority. Myself, I am getting pretty excited too. We are going to have a big break from mission work this week since we will go to Freetown on Thursday morning and come back on Sunday night. It should be fun to see all the other elders in Freetown and see my old converts. Anyway, things here are great - no complaints really. Just kickin' along trying to finish with my foot on the gas.

Happy Valentines day tomorrow. I hope Brooklyn will be my valentine! Love ya guys!

Love Elder Kev