May 23

May 23, 2016

Amobihpo is such a college town! Everyone we teach is a student at the University with the exception of a few people. One of those people is named Christian. I love him. He first was introduced to the missionaries when he went to his cousins baptism. (Side note: His cousin and his wife were baptized a few weeks before I came here to Ambohipo, and they are doing really well.) After the baptism Christian apparently went up to the missionaries and told them that he felt great and wanted to be baptized. So we have been teaching him and his family, and yesterday he came to church!!! Hopefully next week his whole family will be there together. They all have accepted a baptism date for July 2nd! I just really hope they are vita soratra (legally married), because if they aren't that could postpone things.
So it is weird serving in a ward. There are so many members! I'm used to branches were you learn who all the active members are in the first week. It's weird having 170 people to try to meet, but we are planning to visit as many as possible and try to teach their families and friends who aren't members.
Speaking of investigators who have family that are already members, last week we started teaching a man (I think he is somewhere in his 20's) who apparently has been coming to church for awhile and he has some sort of responsibility with the choir. He is the nephew of some members and lives with them. So I'm not really sure why he hasn't met with missionaries before, but he is very interested in learning more about the gospel. He really wants to find the truth--practically the perfect investigator. We have been teaching him with his cousin who is a return missionary. I'm really excited for him!! Hopefully he will progress towards baptism.

Word of the week is mivoatra which means to progress.

I love you guys!!!
I am excited to see pictures of my new niece/nephew!

May 16

May 16, 2016

It is really fun serving in one of the wards where Wesley served. A lot of members still remember him.

They all know him as the really tall elder. This week hopefully I'll meet more members. I might get some pictures too hopefully! It is a bit different serving in a ward. There are so many members! I am used to being able to learn about all of the active members in less than a week. Its also really nice to not have any responsibilities when it come to church services. We don't have to bless or pass the sacrament or teach gospel principles, though I actually really enjoy doing those things. I'm assuming I'm not going to have to give any talks. I gave two in my last branch and I was only there 3 months. I was asked to bear my testimony on Sunday. I thought I had escaped because the first and second speaker spoke, but right before the last speaker the bishop nudged the second counselor who was conducting and he told everyone that there was a new missionary and asked me to bear my testimony.

My companion is Elder de Klerk. His native language is Afrikans, and he is from Johannesburg. He is a pretty cool guy. We are kind of different, but we get along fine. It's fun having a companion from somewhere other than the USA. He just finished getting trained, so his language skills aren't perfect (mine aren't super great either). I'm learning to let him talk as much as possible mainly because I am not very familiar with the area or our investigators. I'm sure over the next few weeks I will learn and improve a lot and probably gain some more humility too.

Ambohipo is a very interesting place. It's pretty close to the center of Tana (Antananarivo) and we have church at the mission office. The University is in our area and we meet a lot of young adults that are students there. Most of their families live somewhere out in the countryside, It's basically the college town of Madagascar. We have a lot of investigators, but not very many of them are families.

The word of the week is mianatra which means to learn.

I love you guys and I'm really excited for Alexis' baby!!



Corey's email to Alexis this week:

I am so excited for you! I literally tell everybody that my sister is about to have a baby!!! YOU ARE GONNA BE A GREAT MOM!!!!

May 2

May 2, 2016

It has been a good week. We got to teach a lot of people.

Our branch president and his wife are the best! They always come say Hi to our investigators (actually a lot of members do), and they make sure they have someone they can sit with. I'm really sad I'm going to be leaving this area soon. It is one of the most beautiful places in Madagascar and has some of the best members.

Speaking of how awesome our members are, they are way great! During most of our lessons we have a member present, and it's usually different people as well. A few weeks a go every lesson we taught we had a member with us. We also got 9 referrals from an 18 yr old guy this week. He has been helping us a lot and preparing for a mission. We went out to his house on Tuesday because he told us he had someone for us to teach. It is like a 45 minute walk from the church. This is a little far normally. We are told we have to stay within a 30 minute radius of the church. When we got there he told us that he wanted to just go talk to all his neighbors about the gospel with us. We went and talked to 8 different families that all seemed very open to the gospel.
Later in the week when we went back one of the appointments fell through so we talked to another family. It was great! When we knocked on their door (Well sort of knock, sometimes there is a gate thing to knock on, but really all do you do is yell odio.) they all came and looked a little confused and asked Dado (that's the member's name) what was new and Dado asked if we could come in and share a message with them. They all said okay, and it went great! It was super great and easy, a hundred times better than tracting (and tracting is pretty easy here in Madagascar compared to the USA)!!! A couple of the young men aged kids we talked to out there came and played soccer with our branch Saturday morning. (We play every sat morning. It is way fun.) One of the young men came to church. His family didn't come because they had family visiting, but we are hoping that maybe next week they do!

Wednesday, President Foote came to our house and made us breakfast and did some interviews. It was way chill! I love my mission president! He is definitely the best! (He also let my last companion call home last week so he could see his parents open their mission call to North Carolina!) He told me that I will probably be getting transferred next week because my companion is going to be a trainer. This makes me really sad because I love Sab Nam, but I'm also a bit excited because I might get to go serve in one of the areas my brother did!

So a few other cool things happened Wednesday. We were looking for one members house who has some less active kids. He is a dadabe (grandpa). So his kids are already grown up but live with him (we think). It was one of the rare times we weren't able to get some member help, but I knew the general area. So we figured we would get close and then ask to see if anyone knew them. We ended up calling our branch president, and he tried giving us directions. At first I was on the phone and got some somewhat understandable directions. He told us that there was mangahazo in front of his house. In Malagasy hazo means tree and manga means mango (manga also means blue and I learned this morning can mean beautiful too). So I assumed mangahazo meant mango tree. Fun fact; it doesn't!  Hazo manga means mango tree. Mangahazo is a cassava which we think is something like sweet potatoes. Luckily my companion knew what a mangahazo was, and he figured there was probably someone selling it near his house. So we started asking people where there was a mangahazo seller. Everytime we asked someone they would ask if we were looking for raw mangahazo or cooked. We didn't know so we called the branch president again and this time Elder Liao talked. Turns out the mangahazo is just growing in front of his house. There wasn't someone selling it. Liao also figured out that it was close to this one building, but we couldn't figure out where to go from there. They told us we would see a fasanam, but Elder Liao thought they said sasana. He had no clue what that meant. Our branch president and his wife are pretty good at English and told him fasana means grave, but he thought they were saying grass. This made no sense to us because they said their was only one. We saw lots of grass. We eventually ran out of time because we had two lessons we needed to get to at 6. So we gave up. Later that night our branch president fed us dinner, and he and his wife cracked up laughing after hearing our side of the story.

So at six I went and taught a family with the branch president. We found them a few weeks ago, and the lessons have been going really well. They have had lots of questions and some concerns. We ended up reading 3 Nephi chapter 11 with them. Afterward I asked what their thoughts were and the dad said we need to get baptized!! I was very excited. We didn't commit them to a date yet. I'm super excited for them!! The spirit was very strong, however there is a bit of bad news with them. The dad left town for some sort of work and it might be a month or so that he is gone, but the mom came to church yesterday. So there is still hope!

Word of the week is gidro which means lemur.