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....