Dusty's Email -- 4/27/2009

Hey, 

We aren’t looking to forward to this next week. We can’t contact or knock doors. Just work with the investigators that we already have and we can get references but that’s about it. So we started yesterday, because there was no church. We visited a couple of investigators. But before that, Elder Pickup and I had a little adventure.

So as we were studying in the morning, we heard a crash out back. We have a little patio behind the house where the boiler is, so anyway, we look back there and a big old bird had crash landed. We realized that he had broken his leg, and was trying to fly, but couldn’t. So we were wondering what to do about the bird, because we couldn’t just leave it on our patio. I taped Elder Pickup in my sombrero acting as the Crocodile hunter with the accent and everything. He was trying to see if it was alive by touching it with an umbrella. But he’s afraid of birds like up close, so when the bird moved he screamed and jumped.

We finally decided the way to remove it was to put it a box and bring him to the park. Elder Pickup had the box, and I had the broom and my camera. We scooped him up and brought him to the park. Elder Pickup put him in a tree and he fell out. We checked later on him and he wasn’t there. We aren’t sure what happened to him. Other than that the day was pretty boring. We made sure not to touch the bird, so all is well.

The sickness, as far as I know, has not affected the missionaries, only our work. We are all taking the precautions necessary, so we should be alright.

I haven’t had much time to find an oven to cook the brownies, but I think that tomorrow were are going do it at the house of a convert. My birthday went well. Last Tuesday we went to the house of this big family to teach them and they threw me a little party. Cake and presents. It was great. Then on Wednesday, my comp and I went to Burger King and celebrated. It was good. I can’t believe that its already been almost a week. This past Saturday I completed 10 freakin months in the mission. ugh...the time is going by to quick.

On Saturday we had a baptism, which was really special. It was a dad of a family that was all baptized except for him. My companion had been teaching him for 3 months and he finally got baptized this last week. How special it was to be a part of that.

As I said, yesterday all the church services were canceled. Actually school is canceled this whole week. The church leaders don’t want to leave their houses, so it’s kind of slowing the work down, baptism wise. But our Bishop has been good about it. We have two more baptisms for this week.

I’m going to ask President this week about Mother’s Day, and let you know the number and everything next week. I don’t think that it should be a problem for you guys to call earlier in the day.

Things are well. Thanks for all the letters about my birthday and I look forward to talking to you on Mother’s day.

Elder Howard