January 23, 2016

Hello Everyone!

Time flies, I'll hit 5 months on Wednesday and I'm now in Port Elisabeth! 

Port Elisabeth is a beautiful city and because we are in Kwano Zone we are a little ways out of town but not much. We stay close by Uitenhage in a place called Despatch. It's a whole lot different than Mthatha and reminds me a lot of California. My area is called KwaMagxaki and covers the townships of KwaMagxaki, KwaDesi, Slovo, amongst others. It is a very large place.

My journey from Mthatha was interesting, when we got on the plane in East London the engine was making some funky noises and wouldn't start. After three unsuccessful attempts at starting the engine we unboarded the plane and waited a half an hour for an engineer to fix it.

We went through security again and reboarded the plane and this time it finally started and we flew the 35 min flight to Port Elisabeth. When we landed we were picked up by the zone leaders and I was taken to my boarding that night. 

I met my companion Elder Milne and he's from St. George! He attended Desert Hills High and so it's funny to talk about back home.... and my southern Utah accent has come back full haha. 

We've really made it a priority to work as hard as we can this transfer. We plan to be in the area 11-8 every day and we have a goal of 20 baptisms, it's going to be hard but it's definitely possible. We've got our first baptism this coming Sunday and it's a guy named Phillip and he's the same age as us and he is so strong in the gospel and loves it. 

Aforementioned we want to push ourselves in the area and we made it a goal to have 6 investigators at church and we were able to get 22 investigators at church- most of them we have set a baptismal date and others we will very soon. We also had 7 less actives back at church and 5 recent converts. 

The ward is very great and the stake president also is in this ward so it's very strong. And- we also have a real chapel and baptismal font so it's pretty awesome! 

I'm excited to continue my time with Elder Milne and work hard to accomplish our goals. It'll be fun to see how we've done at the end of this transfer in 6 weeks. We need your prayers! 

Until next week from KwaMagxaki

Transfer Day with MTC Transfer

At the Airport with Elder Thulari

Beautiful Coast of PE

Elder Milne with his two "dads" 

Dinner with Motherwell and Zwide Elders at Mama Virginia's home before she moves back to England for the next few months (like a snowbird in Utah but instead of St. George to Salt Lake it's SA to England)

Following the news... It's interesting to see the different views of what's happening back home.

With Elder Milne at the Mgagula home (Brother Mgagula is in the bishopric)