Naked People Everywhere

Hayden at Church in Ambositra

Hey everybody! Things are going great here! The area is still way tough and I still have no idea what I'm doing but I'm getting used to it! 

I'm gonna give you guys a little bit more detail of my area cause I didn't write much last week, but my area is called Ambositra. There haven't been missionaries here in like a year and a half so we're pretty much starting from scratch. Every once in awhile we will run into someone who was taking the lessons before they closed it, but not very often. 

The house is pretty nice. It doesnt have hot water so what I do is boil a pot of water and pretty much give myself a warm spongebath cause I'm too big of a baby to handle a cold shower. I bet all of you think that I'm probably dying of heat over here but you're WRONG! It's soooo cold haha. I wake up every morning and have to like force myself to get rid of the blanket. We also didn't have a working phone until yesterday so they literally just droped us off here without hot water, no phone, and no washing machines. We have to wash all of our clothes by hand because the washing machine doesn't work. 

But yeah, it's a pretty nice house, probably one of the nicest in the city. A majority of the people here live in pretty much a 10 square foot cement room in a complex of like 20 other houses. Some people have nicer houses but that's pretty much average. 

Ambositra is a pretty cool city. It is famous for its wood working so I'm gonna get some pretty cool souveniers. It is also a huge farming town so there's a lot of people who are farmers here.  But most people just sell stuff on the side of the road or are carpenters here. The people are all really nice here. A lot of times you just knock on a door and hear "mondroso" which means come in, so that is pretty awesome. What isn't awesome is how often you get a return appointment and they aren't there. Pretty much 50 percent of the time they're not going to be there which is really dissapointing. It also feels like I have been tracting for the last 500,000 years. I've taught the first lesson 29 times this week and we've only taught about the Book of Mormon twice haha. I'm way good at the first lesson though haha.

Something else that is funny is that they've got a huge problem with modesty here haha. Like we'll be sitting in a lesson with an investigator and they'll just start breastfeeding without batting an eye. The first ten times I saw it I was a little taken back but by now I'm pretty used to it. One time we were trackting and this lady answers the door with half her chest hanging out and she didn't even realize it for like 5 minutes haha. But yeah that's just Madagascar for ya. 

Me and Elder Olsen are getting along way well and the work is coming along. We're finally starting to get a little bit of a program so we don't have to keep tracting all day every day, but still we've got a long way to go haha. The members here are awesome. They gave us a list of like fifteen referrals so that'll keep us busy for awhile. They're way excited to have missionaries here again which is soo cool.

But Yeah that's about it for this week. I love you all and miss you a ton!