Colby in Kampala: 7 Bird Daydream

Sometimes the simplest parable can have a great meaning. I miss my little bird but he is flying high and doing good. Can't wait for him to rejoin us!

Hey friends and family,

This week was pretty nice. I have had my thoughts kind of be all over the place over the last 7 days. It has been good on me and bad on me. I learned a lot about myself though and it has helped me a lot. So to begin I am still not legal for proselyting. I still don't have a work permit and so I am now just visiting members and less-actives. Here is the problem. The branch has 15 active members out of 395 baptized. So 15 out of 395 come to church. Of those 15, 4 speak English. So we have 4 active members to visit. Of the other 380 my guess would be, of those that answer the phone, 30 speak English. Of those 30 maybe 5 are willing to meet us. So that leaves us with roughly 10 people we can visit a week. Soooooo we are often left with nothing to do. We meet with people when they can and when we have no one to see we usually just call through our list and if there is no one then we sit somewhere like the church or a cafe and drink some pop and read some stuff. We have printed off some conference talks and sometimes my comp and I sit at the church and read a talk at the same time and talk about it as we go. That is what we got going for us right now. With patience I will soon be legal and will get some real work done! One plus is that this break has made me incredibly hungry to do missionary work so when I get that working permit I am going to explode.

We had some good things happen this week... and some bad. We were about to baptize Emiyu and had her interviewed and taught. She was completely ready and then Saturday morning we got a call that she was having some medical issues that would last the weekend and then she would be back on her feet. So we postponed the baptism until this coming Sunday. That is okay. There is no rush there and she is really solid so it will work out great! As for Ermiyas... Eizo to that man. He left Addis for a little while and came back Saturday. We texted him and he didn't respond. After we saw he wasn't coming to church on Sunday we texted him to check up. He sent back a novel length text on how our church is from Satan and does not go hand and hand with the Bible. He explained that the church believes blacks are inferior because of the curse put upon the Lamanites and that blacks didn't get the priesthood for a while. He also said many other rude things and told us to leave Ethiopia before we are damned.... Yeah so that is a good taste of missionary work in Ethiopia. We taught this man everything. He was so great. He knew everything was true and loved the church. Then Satan slapped him around a little and he woke up never the same. Hmmm. Well, we are just going to move on! That is life.

I had a funny thing happen this week. You all might think it is a little lame but there are some little things in life when you are in a 3rd world country on the other side of the world that make it a little easier. One day I was at my house at about 5 in the afternoon. We had an appointment at 6 and nothing until then (remember I am legally not aloud to do anything when we don't have appointments). I was laying in my compound and was using a flat soccer ball as a pillow and just looking up at the sky with some Vocal Point playing. I got pretty trunky just laying there. I had two thoughts running through my head. The first was "What on earth am I doing right now laying in the middle of Addis on a flat soccer ball" and the other "You should stop being trunky and just accept that this is your life for a little." I started praying and asking God to help me situate myself and understand why things are going the way they are. After I prayed I just stared at the sky and let my thoughts run. This is where things get cheesy. I noticed in the sky that there were 7 birds flying in unison. They just flew around above me for a good 5 minutes. It was some good entertainment so I watched them. After a little I noticed one bird just took a hard left and flew far from the other 6 birds and began spiraling and looping and going nuts for a good 5 minutes. It just branched off by itself for a good while and enjoyed its time. After it was finished it smoothly joined back up with the 6 and they kept flying together. So I thought, there are 7 people in my family and I think we all fly pretty smooth together. Now for a good while I am branching from the family and doing flips and tricks out here in Ethiopia while my family is still smooth sailing back home. And one year from now I will slide right back in with the 7 of them and my life will be back to normal. Ha, its a funny story but I just felt a good comfort from the situation and it made me realize everything is going to work out the way it should.

Well, other than that things were great this week. There was this riot in Stadium from a soccer game going on. Elder Tesch and I had to walk through it to get to an appointment. There were hundreds of bodies rushing down the road while police were just caning and beating people seriously. But that is kinda normal here to get beaten by police. In fact the police are so uncivilized and broken here they were using tree limbs to beat because that is all they have. Then Elder Tesch and I were just swimming upstream through this running riot super confident and waving at everyone with smiles as they ran in terror from tear gas and police. It might sound crazier than it was. Trust me, if it were dangerous we would not have walked through it. But we felt so safe and normal and knew that if we kept pushing with heads up that we could get to our appointment just fine. And we did. That is just a funny side note for the week. Ethiopia is crazy!

So that is my week. Just a good and normal one with some funny experiences. I am about to go eat some raw sheep after this so that is cool. It's good. Yep, thanks everyone for being great back home and being civilized and loving. You are the best!

Love,

Elder McLain