I Feel Like This Is The Reason I Was Called To Serve Here. I Love With Everything I Am

Hello family and friends!

I want to begin by saying I was overwhelmed by all the emails and love I received for my birthday. You have no idea how much it meant to me! Thank you for making my 20th so great.

It was a really good week this week. I have started to love this place so much and the work here. I am happy to say that my transfer news is great! I am staying in Beklobet for another transfer and getting an awesome companion! His name is Elder Tesch from St. George. He is so awesome. We served in the same area in Ntinda and have been on exchanges many times so we get along extremely well. Plus he loves cars and all that so we have things to talk about! I am just really excited.

This week a lot happened this week in Beklobet. We are working hard and seeing great blessings. In the last week we had an amazing investigator come our way. His name is Ermiyas. He was told of the church by a non-member friend and was able to contact us. He came to church on Sunday and asked for a baptismal date. He loves the church and is so great. He speaks very good English as well. We have taught him twice now and he literally said he was tired of seeing all the traditions of men that all Ethiopians believe in. He wants to find the true church. We hope and pray he will progress to baptism! Another amazing miracle has been the progression of President Desta, our Branch President. When I came to the area I was told by many  that he is a strict and tough man. He is the Police Commander over all of Addis Ababa and has a hard time showing love. In the past he has really been hard on missionaries and the branch. I chose to start fresh with him and do my best to change that. He has changed incredibly. I have prayed and asked to know what I can do to help him and I have learned. I began showing incredible love to his wife and children. Before, missionaries only visited about once or twice a transfer. Right now we visit twice a week and hold Book of Mormon reading with them. Every time we see him he embraces us with a big hug and always says he loves us so much. He is an amazing man and far from the President Desta I have previously heard of. I really feel like this was the reason I was called to serve here. I love him and his family with everything I am. It has blessed my life to meet and serve them. 

There are a few members I have grown to love so darn much here. One of which is Desta's family. Another is a woman by the name of Sister Weynshet. This woman has to be the most faithful saint of all time. I am so impressed by her faith. When she was a child she was beat by her caretaker so badly that she went blind in both eyes. Since then she has made her way to Addis, graduated college, and now works as a caretaker and takes in other blind girls. She gets them through school and on to a better life. She is amazing. Right now she is taking care of 6 completely blind girls. As I said she is also fully blind. She cooks, cleans and raises each one on her own. Can you imagine? Blind?! We go visit her a lot. She lives far in a place called Shiro Meda (google it). It is up in the mountains and really cold. Every Sunday she taxis from Shiro Meda to Lancha for church. I want to help them out so bad. Right now a house of 7 girls including her self and it is just falling apart. There are leaks in the ceiling everywhere, walls torn down and much more. I wish we could help in any way. I think we are going to try and do a zone service at her house soon and just fix everything up. Recently we started teaching one of her blind girls named Emiyu. She is amazing! The first time we taught her it was a simple spiritual thought from Mark. The second time we taught about the Atonement. By the end of the second lesson she was frustrated that we weren't sharing more about our church! She came to church on Sunday. Sister Weynshet, blind, brought Emiyu, also blind, to church by a 45 minute taxi commute! She loved church. We are visiting her tomorrow and will talk about baptism. Like Weynshet, Emiyu was beat as a kid by her mother. She grew up in a village far from Addis and was extremely poor. When she was beat so bad that she became blind, her family disowned her as a child and made her their maid. She was a servant for her family for years and at 14 was brought to Sister Weynshet by her aunt for a better life. She is 16 now and in 3rd grade. Her heart is so strong. I love her! 

I ate some bad food this week! Ha! Twice we had just horrible meals fed to us by members. It was funny. I have gotten really good at just throwing things back and finishing them. This meal was gag worthy with every bite. It was stomach fir fir. Fir fir is when they take injera, break it up and soak it in a broth then you eat it with nonsoggy injera. Its not that great. But man, when they add sheep stomach and intestines it becomes a whole lot worse! It was just soaking in stomach juice and tasted awful! I finished it all though while my comp (who is from Africa) struggled to finish one bite.

Well I gotta go. Thanks for wishing me a happy birthday! I Love you all!

Love,

Elder McLain

Me and Galilah (President Desta's daughter)

My favorite human on earth. She speaks zero english 

Check out my little ponytail

 Galilah

Sister Weynshet cooked dinner for us!

Missionary Work Isn't Easy Because Salvation Isn't Easy. What Can I Do To Make A Difference

Hey guys,

First things first - I just want to take some time and write a real deal weekly email. I owe it and have really slacked lately. I can give you guys the full run down and all that jazz this week. It is my birthday this week! I turn 20 on Saturday! I will probably celebrate by going to a place called MKs Pizza for dinner and paying the extreme amount of about $7 on a Large Meat Lovers pizza. And I will get a coke too! ha.

To catch some people up, I am serving in Ethiopia now. About a month ago I took a plane up here to Addis Ababa and am now serving in a place called Beklobet. BKB is the slums or ghetto of Addis Ababa (not trying to scare you Mom) but it is a really great place. Addis is a lot more developed than anything I ever saw in Uganda. I am serving in a big city now! It is weird and entirely different from Uganda. I really do miss Uganda and especially Masaka. I loved that place to the grave and am so grateful to have served there.

The work in Beklobet is sort of slow right now. Actually to be honest it is incredibly slow. It has picked up a lot since I first got here. The church is struggling in a way here. Right now there are 5 branches. Each branch has about 30 people in attendance. To put it in perspective there are over 100 million people in this country and my home ward in Provo has more active members than this whole country. Ha! That is a crazy thought. Right now there are 10 missionaries in the country. The upside of that and something my Dad mentioned last week is that 100 million people and 10 missionaries leaves us with a bazillion people to talk to and a load of missionary work! The church is at a low here for many reasons. Government, religion, pride, unrest to name a few.

The Orthodox church has pretty much become the culture here. It is a large majority of the population and they have massive catholic style churches every where. It is one of those religions that heavily runs the lifestyle of the members. They dress weird, sort of like Muslims. They tattoo crosses on their face. Pretty much (and I mean no offense to anyone) a lot of their doctrine just heavily contradicts the Bible and our Saviors teachings.

When I first came to this country I felt like I just had a million enemies around me. It wasn't 5 minutes out the door on my first day that someone was screaming at me to leave the country. I was taken back by the amount of tribulations missionaries go through here. I was mad at first and had a horrible attitude. I had a thought the other day that has really changed me though. I was asking myself what I could do here that would be unique or new and make a difference as a missionary. I was frustrated and almost angry at God. I kept asking myself why it was so hard. Two things came to me. The first is I wanted to figure out how to get these people who are so set in their ways to change. I realized one thing and it is that though these people are set in a wrong way, they have faith. These people are so faithful to their church. Rain or shine, day or night, drunk or sober, healthy or sick, these people give everything to their church. I thought that the only way I could make a difference would be to be set in my ways as strong as these people are set in theirs. When I am as faithful, as serious and even as stubborn as these people, that is when they will see light and that is when they will want to change. The other thought that came to me was a talk given by Elder Holland titled Missionary Work and the Atonement. My companion and I were listening to this talk the other day and it really gave me some confidence. Elder Holland addressed the same question I was asking myself a few nights early. He answered it by saying that missionary work is not easy because salvation is not easy. That is the honest truth. It can't be easy to share the gospel because salvation is not easy. It takes work and takes digging deeper when things get a bit harder. So my attitude of the work and church has changed a lot in the last few weeks. I have started to love it here!

One downer this past week, we got roughed up (in other words mugged) the other day but we just complied and it all went well. Got my wallet taken and our phones. My area is a bit in the hood so it can be sketchy sometimes. Nothing too serious would ever happen though. As long as we cooperate people wont hurt us. Don't worry, I feel fine and safe and confident here!

Our investigators are doing okay. Our teaching pool changed around this week. We lost some investigators and gained some. One of my favorites, Tesfaye the Pastor, told us his wife and kids would kick him out if he joined our church so he politely declined. I was a bit sad but that's just the way it goes. Its okay. We had a recent convert named Slomon invite two friends to church on Sunday. They came for the last hour and that was awesome. Referrals don't happen very often here so we are grateful for that! As well we had a man we were trying to meet last week named Tefasse. He was a great guy but we couldn't find the time to meet. When we lost our phone we lost his contact. That was rough. We had no way of seeing him and he had no idea where the church was. On Sunday he magically found the church in Meganagna and attended! He told the missionaries there we forgot about him and he was angry! We were able to get his contact back and will start teaching him this week! As for most all of our other investigators they have stopped meeting with us. So that is our work for right now.

Well, that is my update for the week. Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday. I am really grateful for it and will have a great birthday out here in Ethiopia. I hope everyone has a great week and celebrated my birthday on Saturday by drinking a soda or getting Chick Fil A. Have a great week! Love you all.

Love,

Elder McLain

P.S. Thanks for the abundance birthday wishes and emails. I felt VERY loved!

Happy Ethiopian New Year!

Hello!

Another great week in Ethiopia! I am really starting to love it more here. Zone Conference and Interviews really helped me out a lot too. Met with President Collings. That was awesome. I am doing well right now. 

Yesterday was Ethiopian New Year sooo no emailing because we were on lock down for the weekend except to go to church!

Well first I will just respond to some questions. Haha your thing about the Lion of Judah made me laugh. Yep, that is Ethiopia for you. Their Orthodox religion is just so confused and loves worshiping idols and all that. As far as Amharic goes, sadly I don't think I will be here in Ethiopia very long. Maybe 5 more months or so. So speaking on the streets is good. They also supply us with church approved language study materials that are really good. 

Well, as for the work things are still a bit slow. We have had a few random people just come up to us and ask us about our church. One guy is named Daniel. This guy just jumped in front of me as we were rushing to meet someone in the city and yelled "Latter Day Saint!" He also told us he read a ton of stuff online about our Bible and all these crazy false doctrines. I have some funny tricks for people like that and I settled him down. We are meeting with him tomorrow. We will see how that goes! On Wednesday we got in to a little tussle with a guy that ended in him getting a free phone and other things. :(( Fortunately phones are completely replaceable. UN-fortunately contacts are not. The worst part is there were a few investigators like Weynshet and Abel were lost when we lost the phone. Man we were devastated.... We went through the whole week having to restart some things. On Saturday we were sitting there at the house trying to think of what to do. We felt like we should just go walk this one direction for a while and see what we could find. Well as we were walking we found Weynshet and Abel boarding a taxi! I yelled for them and just ran up and gave them huge hugs. They were really confused why I was so happy to see them but that was our only way of continuing to teach them! We found them! That was a good day.

I do miss cars a lot and am really excited to come home to some work on mine and the others. That sounds so awesome!

I gotta continue on. Have a great week! Thanks for all the help. 

Love,

Elder McLain

A visit to Portuguese Bridge and Debre Zeit

Hey Everyone!

We had a good week and a lot of fun. Ethiopia is a really fun place. I am enjoying it a lot here and adjusting well. Right now I feel like I have everything figured out finally and I am settled in good. Yeah, Ethiopia is beautiful. It is really green right now. That little girl is our District Presidents daughter. She is Ethiopian! Thats how light they are. 

We found quite a bit of success and even had a few miracles. I am really happy with how the week went. All is well here. Not a ton happened. We did exchanges in Debre Zeit, that was fun and I learned a lot. On P-Day today we went to Portuguese Bridge. It was a really scenic place with animals like Baboons and stuff going around. Cool place! My companion and I are doing well. He is Elder Munsey from San Diego. Imagine Ryan, my cousin, as a missionary. They are the same exact person. We are getting along well. He doesn't really know the language and so we struggle with Amharic together but he knows enough. I am learning slowly but surely. Its a fun language and culture. 

Anyways, this week some cool things happened. Addis is a really cool city because it is decently developed and almost feels like a state side city sometimes. Minus the terrible traffic laws, bad roads, human feces on the sidewalk and Amharic written everywhere. Haha. This week a cool event that took place was some International (maybe continent wide) road biking race. They blocked off all of the roads and we were able to see teams from the whole continent flying through the streets of Addis. It was fun to watch. I am not sure what the race was but maybe you could look in to it!

We got some nice foods. We were fed by a recent convert some delicious food almost to the point of throwing up! Hahah. Also, the Moores, an Embassy family, gave us a ton of pasta and stuff from the US. Trader Joes actually. It was delicious. We still have quite a bit. So good!

We found some really nice investigators this week. A few seem very promising. It is good to get some investigators because before this week we had zero. We are still doing a lot of less active work but we had a few people come to us. The first is named Tesfaye. He is a Pastor for the Red Cross Church in Saris. We were walking past his work one day and he approached us with some fire. He actually wanted to confound us a little but we just calmly answered. We set a time to meet with him and later that week he came through to the church. As we met he quickly changed his attitude and the lesson was incredibly spiritual. Long story short by the end of the lesson he was jumping up and down in his chair and telling us he knew he had been wrong. He literally bore his testimony on the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and thanked God in his prayer that Christ's apostles restored the Priesthood to Joseph Smith. It was soooo awesome! He couldn't thank us enough. He is a great guy. The other is a family of 4. The parents are Abul and Weynshet. They have a 13 year old and 8 year old, both boys, and are pregnant with a 3rd. Their lesson was extremely spiritual. They found a pass along card a long time back and just decided to call the other day. When we talked about eternal families it led in to the Plan of Salvation. As we explained that the Fall of Adam and Eve was not a curse but a part of Gods plan, Weynshet told us that she completely agreed and now the Plan made so much more sense. They loved the lesson and love the church. We are praying for all of them right now and hope they can avoid outer influence and come unto Christ.

Right now things are going great. Satan is working hard against us in a way. We have had a few intense scares over the last week but we have come together as a district and are fasting and praying to over come it. And we are. I am doing a lot better every day and am liking the work a lot more. Thanks for the email this week dad. I am glad all is well at home. Have a great week. 

Love you so much!

Elder McLain

 Portuguese Bridge

 In the Ethiopian Fog

 Debre Zeit Chapel

Eating bread