Christmas in Ethiopia

Hey everyone!

Merry Christmas! I hope all of you enjoy the holidays and family. Christmas in Ethiopia is a bit of a bust. They don't really celebrate it cause of the Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian calendar making it like December 17th, 2010 here. Idk it is weird. Either way, transfers took place and my new area is sweet!

We had a really good week in the area and have a lot of work to do. Right now we have a lot of solid investigators. We have 9 people with a baptismal date. This week alone we set 4 baptismal dates with people and should set another tomorrow hopefully. A few of our powerful investigators are Alex, Dawit, and Sara. I don't really have much time to email today because we are heading to our friend's house to call home! So I will give a full recap of my investigators next week.

Well, I just wanted to check in and send some photos. I hope everyone has a good Christmas. Love you guys!

Merry Christmas!

Love,

Elder McLain

 In a bajaj on the way to dinner

The front of my new church

 At dinner. My comp is across from me

 The meal she cooked for us. Best local food yet

A Christmas cake from the branch president's wife

Ethiopia forever. Hagare! Melkam Gena!

Hey guys!

Good week. It was full of my favorite meals and goodbyes to the branch. I am finished with my work here in Beklobet. My next transfer is going to be in Megenagna! I have been hoping to serve here for some time so I can't wait! It is still in Addis Ababa and actually about 15 minutes from my current area so just a hop and a skip across town to my new area! I have a ton of friends in the Meg branch that I have sent home pictures of too so I can't wait to be around them. Megenagna is the thriving branch of Ethiopia. And the apartment is super nice. It will be darn fun!!! I will still be working in the office. My new companion is Elder Chandler. He was born here in Ethiopia then adopted at a young age to a family in the US and raised in Idaho. He is a great Elder and I look forward to being with him. I keep getting really lucky with my companions. I am yet to have one to struggle with. I've loved em all! Elder Chandler seems to me like what my dad would be like as a young 20 year old missionary. He is quieter but humorous, tall, and loves engineering and drones and rockets. In fact he plans to take classes from my dad in the future I think. Ha! So here is to being companions with an Ethiopian version of my dad. Cheers!!!

Since Elder Tesch and I are both leaving and we both got really close to members, this week was a week full of dinners. Some of THE BEST foods I have had since I have been on mission. The Moores are my favorite and you will see why. This was the line up:

Monday - Pres. Eyob our district pres. He cooked some nice spaghetti.

Tuesday - Lunch Sister Moore took us to Rainbow Korea. I ate the most expensive meal on my mission. Like almost $20 a person. I ate Beef Bulgogi and a few other dishes. SO GOOD.

Dinner was at the Francoms. We ate Hawaiian Haystacks. Bomb...

Wednesday- Back to the Moores. SHE MADE THAI FOOD. I Ate Tom Ka Gai, Pad Thai and a few others. Easily the best meal I have had. She can COOK.

Thursday - Brother Conner took us to a nice restaurant called Antika. I had grilled Talapia. It was great.

Friday - Esthers family from Meg Branch wanted to see Tesch off so we went and had local food at their house. Always fun.

Tomorrow we are having a Christmas party at the Megenagna chapel. We got some pizza from a Debonairs. Its a pizza chain from South Africa that is really nice. We will play a white elephant game. Should be fun!

I also gave a talk in church yesterday. I spoke on the Plan of Salvation and cleared up some branch wide misunderstandings that were going around. It was a very simple talk. Pretty much as if I were teaching the lesson but to a large group and without a companion to assist me. It was good and a great way to close with thanks to the branch for helping me serve around them. 

That is about it for the week. Just a bunch of good news!!!! I am so excited for next transfer! 

Merry Christmas everyone! Thanks for everything. Love you all!

Ethiopia forever. Hagare! Melkam Gena!

Love,

Elder McLain

Me and Sulan

Sweetie. 

Thought I was leaving Addis but actually 

got transferred to this families branch!

Me and Homey

 The fort I built Sunday night after proselyting. 

Cool guys fort.

Saying goodbye to the Moore's!

MOUNTAIN DEW!!! It has been too long!

Frozen cat. And people say Ethiopia is hot... 

Thai food from the Moore's. Best food to date!

Bad Sushi.....

Hey guys,

This was a pretty good week. I had some really fun days and a few sick days. What's new though. 

We spent a bit of time helping our friend Abel teach some English classes. I really enjoy this. LDS missionaries in Addis Ababa don't have the best reputation. With the help of some previous missionaries and rumors among the crowd, people don't see us the way we would hope. So we are doing what we can to change that. We find that English class allows us to talk to a couple hundred people at different times and show them that we really are just some normal people without any guile or bad intention behind our missionary efforts. A lot of people are really grateful for the help we give them. They say their biggest set back for learning English is a lack of confidence in speaking. When they speak to us and we speak to them it softens them up and helps them build confidence in themselves. All around, English class is really fun. I will miss helping and being around our man Abel. I've made some best friends here for sure.

On Friday we had a pretty normal day. We went in to the office to do some office work. There I met the Megenagna Elders. They had some food given to them by a member. It was pretty much rice and curry. Really nice. We ate it for lunch and things were good.... for a little. Later I started to get horrible acid reflux. Like soooo bad. I was in a ton of pain just laying on the couch with my chest and throat burning. I've had acid reflux before but this was a new level. I don't even think this was acid reflux I think I ate a piece of Satan and he was just hanging out in my chest. I hope my worst enemies never get this feeling. It was the worst! During the pain I managed to get all of the food out of my body via the throat spillway. Blew chunks for a few hours. It lasted through the night leaving me with hardly any sleep. When I got up in the morning I called the Meg Elders to see if they were okay and low and behold Elder Richardson lightly kicked the bucket and was head first in the toilet too. Yep... So the rice and curry was good but not great! I am all better now. I titled my email "bad sushi" because whenever I throw up I think back to this time my family was on vacation and I saw a guy projectile vomit the worlds amount of throw up and his friend just put his hand on his back and said "bad sushi?"

We had a baptism this week! Sister Weynshet was baptized on Sunday. It was a great baptism and all things went fairly well. We got there in the morning for our coordination meeting with the Branch Presidency and President Desta told us that Sister Mulu had the key to the closet with all the baptismal gear. Well shoot, Sister Mulu is inactive. No clue why she had the keys but it was bad because we had no access to the baptismal suits! So Elder Tesch and I had to leave church at about 9:20 after taking the sacrament and taxi to Megenagna Branch to borrow baptismal suits and be back in time for the service. The trip took about 2 hours but we did it. So the service went great. Weynshet is so awesome. She is a 49 year old born and raised Orthodox woman. By the way 49 here is like mega old. Sorry Mom and Dad... Hahaha. Anyways, she had no problems investigating the church. She just loved it from the beginning. Before even sharing about the Word of Wisdom she told us she was aware and had stopped all coffee and tea. Just a really great convert to the branch. We are happy!

Today I heard a bunch of commotion outside of our house. I ran outside to see what was up and right outside our gate was a man on the ground in tears just getting thrashed. Turned out he was stealing from this van next to our house and was caught in the act. They grabbed him and took him out of plain sight and beat him pretty bad with a stick and all that fun stuff. That's how they handle it here. We stepped passed the beatings and headed to the shop by our house to buy a soda. On the way back we saw them picking him up off the ground and whipping him like a horse telling him to leave. Just like that the bloodied up man was let loose. Interesting morning. Following that we were walking down the road and saw a guy being pretty rough to a girl. If there is one thing I absolutely hate about Ethiopia it is the way they treat their women. They think it is completely okay to be rough on them. This guy was grabbing her and she was resisting so he shoved her into a wall and started yelling at her. I couldn't handle it so I ran up and grabbed the guy and pushed him off of her. I then told him if he lays another hand on her I will be the first to handle him much worse. I didn't intend to speak poor but I am tired of seeing women thrown around into the dirt here. I have seen women just brutally beat here just for being women. Geeeewhhiiizzzz.

Well, it is the last week of the transfer in the area. It is likely that I am leaving Beklobet so I am going to soak it in this last week. It has been a great area full of challenges and blessings. I will miss it! I am gonna wrap up for the week. Thanks everyone for reading my emails. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy being here. That'd be hard though! 

Love,

Elder McLain

 Me with bread

 President Desta's daughter Galilah was also baptized

 Sister Weynshet's Baptism

 A hike we did a few weeks ago

 Zone Conference lunch at Rodeo Addis

Loading the car to go to Segey's Mom's funeral. 

This tiny car had like 20 people in it by the time they left

Eight of us guys just floating out here entrusted to carry the work

Hey everyone,

I hope everyone is having a good week and the weekend was great. My week was really good. A lot went on this week that kept us fairly busy. PS I dont have spell check on this computer and my spelling and grammer is just low quality these days so I apologize for any mistakes through the email.

So because of Zone Conference the Elders in Hawassa came to stay with us in Beklobet. They got here on Friday and helped us with some lessons. It is Elder Cooper and Elder Neff. Both are born Ethiopians adopted to the US and are back here for mission. Elder Cooper came on mission with me and is one of my good buddies since the MTC so it was awesome to spend the time with him. He caught back on to Amharic very fast and can translate lessons so he helped me teach some new investigators we haven't been able to teach due to language barrier. That was a huge blessing. It is also cool to hear Amharic with an American accent. It helps me to know better what I can say. We got to meet with Eskeder. She was the referral from a woman in Utah. The woman in Utah has been sponsering Eskeder through school and into College. Finally she felt like it was time to introduce her to the church. So Eskeder came to church yesterday and we were able to teach her the Restoration. It was a pretty great lesson but also hard to teach. Mainly because I would teach in English, Elder Cooper would translate. Then he would teach in Amharic and I would just listen my best to know what he said and hope I could start up in the right spot when it was my turn again. Hope that makes sense. My descriptive English is garbage these days... Haha. 

Zone Conference was great. President focused his thoughts on Constant Finding and Exact Obedience. He showed us a lot of statistical charts from the church that show our missions monthly progress up next to the South East Africa Area progress. It was cool to see that our mission is above the rest of the area in almost all statisitics. Not that numbers matter but success of course is important. Some things we need to work harder on is making sure our New Investigators are baptized. Our mission struggles more so with new investigator to baptized convert ratio. I believe it is 11:1. Our Investigator with a Baptismal date to Baptized Investigators is 3:1 and our Investigators to Attend Church to Baptized Investigators is 2:1. I think that is cool. We ech set a baptismal goal with our companion for the rest of the year. We decided on 3. So he then explained if we are going for 3, that requires roughly 33 new investigators, 9 with a baptismal date and 6 coming to church. With those numbers we could achieve 3 baptisms before 2018 in Beklobet. It was neat to see the statistical side of missionary work. Again, it is not a number race but not setting goals is not having hope and "trying" our faith as you (Dad) explained in your spiritual thought to me.

President Collings was in Ethiopia from Friday to today. He left this morning. He doesn't travel with his Assistants. The main reason is visa problems. It is hard to travel international without preparation. That is why you usually find out about 3 weeks early if you are leaving your assigned country. So the Elders went from 6 to 8 here. And even next transfer it is possible we go to 10! He wants to put 2 more Elders in Hawassa. That would be cool. We are progressing! Honestly the work in the country is going a lot smoother and better right now.

I do also think I have grown an inch on my mission. I think I am at 6'3" now. Don't count me on it but I seem to be taller than those that say they are 6'2". Cool! I was also telling mom that my weight is all over out here. I came on mission at 135 lbs. In Masaka I peaked at 160 lbs. Now I am down to about 140 lbs. The reason is simply that the food is just not nutritional. Not much comes out of eating injera every day and walking everywhere. So, I hope I don't get much skinner. Next stop is some adult weight, still need to get some of that. 

On Friday I went to Debre Zeit to perform a Baptismal Interview. It was a wild ride there. We couldn't find any transportation there and it conflicted with out office work so we got a personal taxi to Debre Zeit and it was expensiiiivvvveee. The church covered it of course but I felt bad cause taxis here are sooo expensive. It was an hour ride out to Debre Zeit to a 15 minute interview and an hour and a half ride back. I love the ride to Debre Zeit so much. It looks a lot like the typical Africa you think of. Grass lands and those flat trees and wild animals. You should look up Bishoftu and see the rural areas out there. Another really cool place in Ethiopia is called Wendo Genet. It is sweeeeet there... After the interview we went in to the office to do some work. I finished before my companion so I got on and watched my previous skypes home and Christmas 2016 and Mothers Day 2017. Wow, not much to say but that my first call home was super goondie. I was a weirdo back then hahaha. Anyways, I look forward to calling home in a few weeks! I think I am a little more normal now so look forward to seeing me!

The times can be tough here in Ethiopia. I often forget I am a part of the Uganda Kampala Mission. We are so secluded from the main group and it causes us to be out of the loop with everything. Right now it is the 8 of us missionaries to the entire country of Ethiopia. There are about 100 or so in Uganda and probably 20 in Rwanda. Here in Ethiopia we havwe little to no communication with the other countries accept for emailing on Mondays. Our network is too poor to call or text and right now there is no senior couple with us in Ethiopia. So the 8 of us guys are just floating out here entrusted to carry the work. It can be tough out here!! But I like it at the same time. Ha!

Well everyone, have a good week. If you are bored, feel free to send me an email. Sometimes it can be nice to hear from friends. Love you guys!

Love,
Elder McLain

Me with a load of birr 

 Rodeo Addis for lunch

 Standing in our new van

Elder Coopers cool Ethiopia sweater. Rasta mother land allo

Sunday Lunch. 

Don't really know, some minced meat and fries....

Found my friend again!

Hey guys!

Yew it was a fast week. And a blur of a week. I don't remember much but I can remember that the week was productive and good! I will update you on the stuff I can remember!

Thanksgiving was awesome! First things, on the way to the Francom's I ran in to a friend I made when I first came. It is a kid named Eyob (Amharic for Job). I made friends with him a little while back. No intentions to share the gospel at first. I just like making friends a lot. He is awesome. I lost his number a while ago and went months without seeing him. Then on the way to the Francom's I just heard a kid yelling from far. I realized it was Eyob. I was super excited to see him! We talked for a minute. I hope soon I can ease him into the gospel. We will see! We found a few new investigators this week. Mostly we just worked on all the investigators we found last week. We received two referrals from people in Utah area through the church website. We talked to them both over the phone and will meet them this week. It is cool how the church works, small world! Weynshet, our investigator, and her son Eyob are still doing great. Eyob works on Sundays sadly. We were told by our mission president that if he can attend at least once a month then we can baptize him. He said he should be able to. Weynshet is super great. She loved our lessons this week. I will be honest, almost everyone I have taught and baptized on my mission are young YSA's. So I am so happy to see someone older. She is about 60 probably. Shock of the week was seeing her at church. The Great Ethiopian Race was this Sunday. It is a 10k that runs all through Beklobet area. Thousands of runners fill the streets so they close off all roads. It was hard for us to get to church and we live a 3 minute walk via back roads. She lives AN HOUR taxi to church. There were no taxis or transportation to church that day and she still came. We honestly don't know how. She is just incredibly dedicated already. Another great surprise was seeing a girl named Wintana come to church too. We found her just as I was coming to Ethiopia. She was great but fell out of contact pretty fast. At church she said she fell sick and is now ready to learn and be baptized! Yes! That is it for the week mostly. Things are going well with English classes too.

Church attendance was 12 this week and church was an hour long.

This week I got a front row seat to some degrading Ethiopian WWE. It was quite sad but pretty crazy to see in person. Long story short we were walking home through the outskirts of Bole and saw two girls fist fighting and puling hair. The fight included some knocked over desks, mannequins, and drinks. After a few punches one girl broke lose and headed straight at a guy walking down the road. She yelled some choice words at him in Amharic. He turned around and she ran into him straight. He picked her up and put her over his shoulder then out of nowhere just through her, along with his shoulder straight int the cement. She landed on her back and head with a loud thud. He then began to throw fists at her and smack her up good. Us along with the help of some others pulled him off and gave him some mean faces so he knew what he did was wrong. Jeeeez it was crazy! Some guys here just don't have a ton of respect for women. The funny thing about it is I often treat women overly kind with like a bow upon greeting or picking up their dishes or something and they just lose it cause they have never ever been treated that way. Haha it is funny.

Yep, that is my fast and crazy week. It was a good one. Now I am ready for another. Happy late Thanksgiving to you all and hello December! Have a great week. Love you guys.

Love,
ElderMcLain

Another great week

Hey guys,

Finally, finally a really great week! We got a lot of missionary work done. A build up of all those weeks not being able to proselyte was let loose this week. We saw some good success with investigators and other things.

So we found 5 new investigators this week. Some better than others but all good. We can really thank the members on this one. We have been pushing the members to be more active in the missionary work. Investigators are much more powerful coming from members. A recent convert from Meganagna branch moved to Shiro Meda in our area. He has been teaching his mom the discussions without telling the missionaries and the other day he brought her and a friend to us. We taught them and they loved it. Happily accepted a baptismal date of December 3rd as well! It is awesome. The next investigators are named Betty and Atseda. They are helpers of Sister Weynshet, the blind lady in our branch. We didn't teach them at first though they sat through some discussions with Emiyu. They have been coming to church the last two weeks and so this week we started teaching them. They are great. Just progressing them slowly. Some others are a Jehovahs Witness investigator we found street contacting. His intentions are more to prove our church wrong than join it. We still give him a chance lucky for him.. Hahaha. We had a great week for investigators. Woo!

I have made a pretty good relationship with the US Embassy families living in our branch boundaries. It has some real good perks with it. First, both the Moores and the Francoms are just soooo awesome. Really fun families. I ate dinner at the Francoms on Tuesday. They made us enchiladas and some other few things. All of it was tasty. On Saturday we saw the Moores while proselyting in Kera. They picked us up and took us to a Korean restaurant. Ohhhhh my word! It was super duper expensive first and second the best dang food ever. I miss nutrients in food. Injera and other local foods just aren't good for you and it is making me skinny and weak again. Hahaha. So when we get real food with real meat its just a shot to the veins and wakes us up again. On Thursday we are going to the Francoms for Thanksgiving. Cant wait!

That is about it for the week. Oh by the way I have strep throat right now... .ahhh. It is okay. We hiked a little mountain to overlook Addis for the day. It was really fun. Some creepy worshipers at the top. Hahaha. 

Have a good week guys. Love you all!

Love,

Elder McLain

 Saying goodbye to the Harline's

They will be missed!

 View from above of Addis Ababa

Goofing around

 The office

  

 Homemade beds

Our awesome meal!

This Place Is My Holy Land

This kid NEVER meets a stranger! And you can bet if they have a skateboard they are his new best friend. 

Hey guys,

A ton has happened in the last two weeks. Pretty much all good things too. I didn't get to email last week. Ethiopia is up to some suspicious junk. They have one internet/phone service to provide for the whole country that is run by the government/China. Right now they are heavily monitoring international communication. So last week we got caught and our internet was cut... Booo. Anyways, this week we are good to email!

First off I FINALLY got my work permit and residence ID. I can now legally work! It was a 3 month battle trying to fill my days and head with good things. I didn't say much but that was probably the biggest challenge of my mission. Spending 3 months just visiting the same 10 people and not being able to tell anyone I was a missionary! Manamen manamen.... 

A cool thing that happened last week, a former investigator of the church from 7 years ago contacted us. He said when he was investigating the church he knew no English. He got a lot of help from the Elders teaching him basic English and helping him read and write. He just wanted to thank us and the church for planting a seed. He told us 7 years later he is teaching English for his profession and he truly speaks some of the best English I have heard from an Ethiopian. He asked us for our help in some classes the other week. We attended a few hours of English class where we simply chatted with over 100 different people over 3 hours. After taking to each person we got to give them our phone number and tell them we were free to meet any time to speak English or share with them. We have now gone to several classes, given our phone number to 100+ people and had many call us to meet. We have busy days now! And I love it! Even when we aren't preaching the gospel I feel so much happiness in just being Christ-like and serving the people here. I have learned in Ethiopia that missionary work isn't all about teaching and baptizing. It is about planting a seed of love and service to the community so that the missionaries that follow will be in a good light and the people will be prepared to listen to them!

A funny side story, not necessarily interesting to all is that I made some friends! The other day Elder Tesch and I were sitting at Meskel Square. I think I have mentioned the place before. I sent a picture home of it last week. It is the place Mom referred to as train tracks. Those are actually path outlines. If you look it slowly elevates up by row. If you run each row starting from the bottom it is a full marathon! So we were sitting there and I saw far in the distance a kid on a skateboard. I flipped out and grabbed my companion. We went and talked to the kid. His name is Eyob. He let me skate with him for a minute. It was so fun! He gave me his number and I called him another day. We met the kids and found a skatepark!!! There is a nice skatepark here and it was so nice to have a bit of reminiscing for the week. Eyob and I are good friends now. I have just made some of the best friends on my mission and a lot aren't even people I teach. 

Today we celebrated Elder and Sister Harline's going home by watching The Blind Side and eating popcorn. Good movie. I loved it. It has been a great week. Lots of trial and trouble through the week but it has all been smothered with the fun and blessings that are happening here. Ethiopia is the greatest place to me. Like Rastafarians I find this place to be my holy land. I never wanna leave!!!!

That's it for the week. Love you all. Have a good weeeeeeeeeeeek.

Love,

Elder McLain

My new friend Eyob 

Meskel Square

 Me and Elder Tesch

 Doing work!

 My new tracting shoes!

Chillin

Found my car in Ethiopia

Some CrAzY things happen in Ethiopia....

Hey guys,

My mission is kind of weird right now. It is still really fun and I love Ethiopia more than any place on earth. I am enjoying everything a lot. I am now about 4 or 5 weeks on no resident's ID or working permit and so I am still not legally allowed to proselyte.... Yeah. Right now we visit all the members we can and then just sit and try to figure out what else to do. This week we found a cheater tactic that is kind of working. We are going to try it more this week. We found a really public place in the city called Meskel Square. It is a cool place you should google it. We go and sit at Meskel Square with a soda or something and just chat or read as a companionship. It draws a lot of attention to see two white guys just sitting there talking and so occasionally we get someone come up to us and see what we are doing. That is about it for us right now. Ha!

Honestly my update for missionary work is really short. We were able to see Emiyu get baptized this week! That was great. She asked me to baptize her. The water in the font was FREEZING and they ran out of water and so it was only up to my knees. So I had to really bend down to get her all the way under. It was a challenge but worked first try! Woo! Another surprise was Getachew, the first member in Ethiopia, came back to church. He was really sick for a while and finally recovered enough. It was great to finally see him at church and he was so happy to be there.. That is as much of an update as I can give for the week. Sorry it was another slow one!

We had some funny and crazy things happen to us this week. We witnessed some interesting stuff! I will just list em off...

1. On the way to an appointment we saw a man cover his mouth and begin vomiting like no ones business. After he finished he just collapsed to the ground with a bang. With others helping we carried him to the shade and got him some water. We had to go shortly after though.

2. I kid you not this one took place 5 minutes after the first incident. We were  still walking to our appointment and saw a young boy with a bag on his head (typical African thing). Out of nowhere he just fell face first and smacked on the cement. He flipped over after and had a seizure and foamed from the mouth. It lasted about 30 seconds. After getting him to shade too we didn't know what to do. There were many to help so we continued walking again...

3. Later that night this FLAMBOYANT lady wearing the most makeup I have ever seen just sat next to me on the train and would not stop staring at me. It was really weird. She looked like Boy George and she was just super make up crazy....

4. On the same train ride we watched 3 police man pile a guy on to the the train and sit him down. Long story short the police were using the public train to arrest a man. Haha...

5. The next day this man was sitting across from me on the train. I noticed a little stick in his head and pointed it out to my companion. Later the man just grabbed the stick and started rubbing his teeth with it like a toothbrush. They use sticks here as a toothbrush. This man stored his in his hair!

6. THIS ONE WAS SO FUNNY.... Again, on the train. 9pm on the train is a weird time. This guy sat by us. He kept looking at me. After about 5 minutes he opened his mouth and in the most american voice says, "Yo you want some weed?" Hahahah. I just laughed and said what??? He went on to tell me he can get me anything I want for cheap... I asked where he was from and he said he was raised in Seattle and that he was deported for drug trafficking and was sent back here.... It was a long conversation with lots of drug talk and swear words and me just trying not to laugh.

7. Some white people came to our church on Sunday. One was a Doctor and the other a Dentist. I literally could not summon the courage to talk to them. I am so so bad at talking to Americans now it is terrible. If you aren't a missionary or an Embassy member I just can't do it. My social skills with white people are at rock bottom right now. Ha!

Oh, we ate dinner at the Moore's yesterday. They fed us BIG.. The husband is from Mission Viejo, CA and the wife is from Osaka Japan. They are so cool. They fed us Korean Ramen with the egg and then brownies and fruit for dessert. THEN things got cool. While dessert was cooking we went downstairs and played Ping Pong. YOo! It was so fun... Then Ayako the mom came with a cardboard box and said to follow her. We went into a storage room and she said, "fill it with whatever you want." Okay so imagine heaven...... American foods of all kind there. We filled a box and it was soooooo nice!!!

Soooo you got to meet Elder Haines!!! That makes me so happy. I can't remember what I sent home with him. Either way I love that guy so much. He is an energy ball! He is a good talker and fun to converse with. I will see him soon in Provo! Can't wait!! Awesome awesome awesome!

That is it for the week. Sorry it was sort of a lame one. Guess you need one of those every now and then.

Love you guys!

Love,

Elder McLain 

Tryna fit in!

 Having our own little Halloween party

I lost!

Emiyu was finally baptized! 

 Pepsi. Ehh......it'll do for now

 Found a kitty

 Church in Ethiopia

Some strange something out there in the bush.....