Settling down in East London & getting to work!

Family!!

How is everything?! bummer about the pads and bolts. oh well. thanks for the nice email. those pictures from Hawaii look amazing! I like that picture of mom jumping in the air! ha. I can see the ocean from East London, its nice. I haven't got the package yet. we get mail every Friday, so hopefully I'll get it this Friday! I'll let you know when I get it. and yeah, Mondays are our P days so this is when I'll be emailing. and yes, I workout a little bit in the morning. Its the first thing we do once we wake up, so I normally just stretch for the first 15 minutes and then do push-ups and situps and use the stretchy bands they gave us. I normally sweat a little bit. and this morning I went on a little run. its not the same as the workouts I did at home, but it's better than nothing! and I haven't used the camera at all since I've been here. It seems to be working fine.

That's a funny story about you taking the wrong bag, then later seeing all those missionaries! ha and that's right, Tom Tom leaves on his mission!

Mom, dad, do you guys communicate with each other?? Dad asks if the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are good, and mom asks is there is peanut butter down here?! what the? ha. but yes, I eat peanut butter on toast for breakfast with some cereal, then like a peanut butter sandwich for lunch if we even eat lunch, then normally we get good food at our DA, but then before I go to bed I have a peanut butter sandwich. thats alot of peanut butter.


Our boarding doesn't have any bugs. I guess one night we left the door open and a few bugs came in, but we keep the windows and doors shut at night so we never have a bug problem. are monkeys considered bugs? ha, cuz a few mornings we see them outside and we throw them bananas and they eat them up. I guess one time an elder saw a monkey sitting on the counter in the boarding!


So far the food we've been eating is similar to American food. I'm positive there are other more rural areas where I'll get some native food, but so far it's just been chicken and rice and other basic food.

One thing that I'm still getting used to is the conversion to rand. I spent 175 rand on food last week. we get 325 rand a week so I haven't used any of my personal money, heck I still need to exchange it for rand!
man, what a first week in the mission field! dang. for P day last week we played soccer with the whole zone, that was fun. then Tuesday we had a really good day. we made it to all of our appointments and found some good people to teach. but Wednesday was rough and seemed really long. It seemed like we just walked all day and didn't get much done. My comp said there was gonna be lots of long days like that. but to make that day even worse, we got to our DA at 8pm and they totally forgot that they were feeding us, but they love talking, so we didn't get home till like 9:45, so then we ate peanut butter sandwiches. ha. We normally eat lunch at about 12:30 then don't eat until 8. It makes the afternoon seem really long.

We literally leave our boarding at 10:15am and don't get back till like 9:30pm. sometimes we get back a little bit earlier and we are asleep by 9:30 cuz we are both so tired.  We have 3 investigators with baptismal dates coming up! I'm excited! its fun to teach them and watch them learn and grow. We recently were tracting and found some solid investigators that i can tell the Lord has been preparing to recieve our message.

Here are some of the names of the people we are teaching....Zinzi, Sonwabile, Nompucuko, Sibongwile, Khayakazi, Syvuyele. You try pronouncing those! ha. I haven't picked up on much of the language yet. I'm still trying to be able to make the "click" sound with my mouth! Its hard. its for sure a unique language.
We got a busy busy week coming up this week. Lots of appointments! and we plan to do some tracting and street contact, yikes! Its scary.

Sorry, I'll try and send some pics next week, I promise!

The initials for our mission are SACTM -  
South Africa Cape Town Mission...or Serve Always Christ The Master. I like that.

well, hope you guys have a great week!

LOVE YOU!!
Elder Haws