A Minha Familia Querida e tambem meus amigos (4-18-16)

Hey everybody, how are you all doing.  This has been a good week up here in Nampula.  I am really liking the area, it is super big, but I am learning to navigate myself.  Just to clarify because a lot of people asked, I dont know that I explained it super well.  So we are the only missionaries for 300 miles.  But that entire space is not our area.  We are supposed to stay within the boundaries of the city of nampula.  All of the little towns between are basically just little villages and no one speaks Portuguese there, so it would be difficult as the church has told us not to teach in dialect.  I am grateful for that protocol, I know how to greet in dialect but anything else would be to much, the languages are as complex as they get, but there is no way to learn them other than by being taught by someone.  No dictionary, no grammar books, nothing.  But this week was nice, I am still getting to know our investigators as well, but the ones that we have I really like, they are all progressing really well.  This week was kind of tough though because of time.  Because we are in an independent branch, everything here is under the keys of the mission president.  Which means we as missionaries have to help a lot as the members learn their responsibilities and what not.  We dont have anyone here though that really knows how to use computers or that has the money to go to the internet cafes, so this last sunday our branch president asked us to download all of the sessions of general conference for this last weekend.  The best internet place here downloads at a speed of about 1.5 mb per second, and it hardly reaches that.  So ended up spending like 4 hours a day this week doing nothing while we waited for these sessions to download.  It was worth it though, I really enjoyed conference.  I hadnt seen any of it in english other than the first session, but I understood it all.  I would get super frustrated at the translation though, because when they translate it we lose a lot of emotion and such, so be grateful to speak the language of the prophets.  But yeah, I also was having cravings for my families conference crepes, and I experimented a little bit and figured it out, so I got to have crepes for conference as well, i didn't have any fancy fillings, but I did have sweetened condensed milk, and that is all you really need in life.  But yeah, that was my week, thank you all for your emails of support and I hope that you have great weeks wherever you are.  Be safe and remember that God knows and loves each one of you individually.  I hope you all feel His love and if you dont, look for His tender mercies, they are everywhere. 

Love,

Elder Anthony Holt

Here is a picture of me and cotton candy, we found a place that makes it, so of course I had to buy it.  They didnt have cotton candy sugar though so they just used plain white sugar, it was very sticky and heavier than normal, but it was cotton candy so who cares.