New Week, New Transfer, New Email (6-20-16)

So I went into my 12th transfer today, and the big news is... I am going to stay here in Nampula.  I wasnt too worried about leaving, Elder Taukiuvea and I both tried to hint to President in our emails that we would like to stay together here, I dont know if that is why, but I am staying.  I haven't been here too long anyways.  But I am super excited for this transfer.  Especially because the best thing about transfers was on thursday we got a call from President to let us know that we would be recieving two more missionaries up here.  I was so excited I literally couldnt hide it.  Elders Jimenez and Osorio got here late saturday night and last night we showed them the area.  We split the area and we are going to give them the half with all the families ready to get baptized, haha.  So it is back to the finding for us, but that is the thrill of missionary work.  The work his in Nampula is historic.  In the 3 months I have been here we have been able to get from a sacrament attendance of 81 my first week to 148 yesterday.  We went from like 7 eternal investigators at church my first week, to 25 investigators yesterday, almost all of which are coming regularly and progressing.  and the best part is we are only finding more.   It is such a historic time to be here right now.  We are seeing this super small branch go from one little branch, to working and growing until, hopefully at the end of this year we can establish the first district here.  It will be the third city in Mozambique to get a district, and if the growth continues at the rate we are seeing I see no reason whey in 5-7 years we cant have a stake here.  It is humbling to have been called to be apart of it.  Before the mission I read stories of Wilford Woodruff and Heber C. Kimball, and the other missionaries in early england, the benbow farm, and everything.  But now I am here in Africa seeing the very things they recorded placed before my eyes.  While I havent met a congregration of 600 people waiting for us, we have been invited my some pastors to preach to their congregations and I am so excited because this is the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and we are coming everyday a little bit closer to having the blessings of a stake, and one day having a temple here in the blessed country.  We had a baptism on Saturday, a man named Junior and a young women named Janete.  Junior has know of the church for like 5 years, but he was finally ready, we just got to be the lucky ones to baptize him.  Janete, I think I talked about her a few weeks ago.  But the first time we visited here there was such an overwhelming look of sadness in her eyes.  But little by little we have seen her become happy, and laugh, and love the church.  While she still has a long way to go, yesterday after her confirmation I asked her how she felt and she said, "I am happy, just happy."  I was talking with Elder Jimenez yesterday, and we were talking about the spiritual side vs. the doctrinal side of the church.  It is interesting because both sides are 100% true and lead people to the church.  For me, as well as most people that grow up in the church our testimony is based on doctrine, and how much every thing makes sense.  For converts to the church it is usually the spiritual experiences that bring them to the church, especially experiences with the atonement.  But they are both so essential to conversion.  It is like a puzzle.  For me, before the mission I saw how it all fit together and it made sense, and I liked that it made sense, but i put the puzzle together upside down and couldnt see the picture.  For those who are drawn by the spiritual side, they see the picture, and it is beautiful, they just aren't quite sure how to fit it together.  The mission has taught me how to merge these two sides together, and it is something that I am still learning, but I know that this church is true, when I have a doctrinal concern there is always the spiritual side to get me through until the doctrince makes sense and vice-versa.  But this has been an awesome week, and please pray for me, I have learned that on the mission often times the highest of spirtual times are followed by the lowest of spiritual lows.  Pray that I may keep the eternal perspective and grow from whatever mountain the Lord in is mercy may send me.  I will pray for you.  I hope all you fathers had a great fathers day.  I thought about making a dead dad joke, but that wouldn't be appropriate, so tchau.

Love, 

Elder Anthony Holt

Baptism Pictures

A little filipino kid in our area.  His moms roomate is a member, they always have us come over on saturdays and he wouldnt eat his dinner, so I made a deal with him, we would race to eat our food and if he won I would take a picture with him

We played the oven mitt box game

A family night (Us helping the youth keep the commandments)

Work, work, work, work, work.... (6-13-16)

Work, work, work, work, work.... i heard that song in a chapa the other day, and I thought it described my life pretty well...So we did a lot of work this week, like normal.  But we are finally getting to our maximum in terms of work.  Seeing as we work with an entire city our time is very precious, and as much as we should be visiting our investigators at least 2-3 times a week, we are barely able to get there once, let alone twice because of how many people we have to teach.  The best part is almost all of them are progressing, or new families that we find every week.  The only problem is it is getting to the point where we have way more to do than we are capable of.  In the past I would just get rid of the things that werent urgent and important, the problem is now, that almost everything we are doing is urgent and important.  and it is so hard.  yesterday at church i was running everywhere, making announcements, helping new investigators, and just trying to enjoy the meetings, and both me and my comp were exhausted just after 3 hours of church, aha.  But we will rest today and get right back at it tonight at 18.  We have been asking president for a second dupla, but we just dont have enough missionaries to send another one up here.  So we are trying to baptize like crazy so that we can prove that it is worth it to send another dupla.  We have worked super hard and havent hit all of our goals, but in working for them we have managed to set our area up pretty well.  I am hoping that I stay here at least one more, I am not worried, i think I will so yeah.  We have a ton of super good families that are just sooooo close I can feel the baptismal waters, but every possible problem you can imagine always happens.  and it is super stressful.  But that is just missionary life.  So a funny story, we have a large population of muslims here in Nampula, but they are cool muslims, not the extremist kind.  Anyways, this last week they started their religious holiday month of Ramadan.  I dont know much about it, but I do know that for the month they fast every day from sun up to sundown, so that is pretty interesting.  But we were knocking doors last night in a nicer area, and the muslims always live in the nicer areas, so we knocked on quite a few of their doors, but they usually just say, hey, we are muslim, and we say, oh thats cool, have a good night, and then walk away.  But last night we knocked this door, an hour after sundown, and this arabic man opens it up, and it was clear that he was a muslim family, and he looks at us and say, DIDN'T YOU KNOW THAT WE ARE BREAKING OUR FAST!!! and then shut (not really slammed) the door on us.  Man, I think every sarcastic switch in my brain flipped, and my comp had to basically drag me out of the predio before I tried to knock again to answer his question with: well today isnt fast sunday so how was I supposed to know, we would love to come in and teach you about fasting in the way the Lord has prescribed. as well as a dozen other less nice responses.  But we kept knocking other doors, and eventually found a non-muslim family who seems pretty cool.  Other than that, we were able to help the family from pemba i talked about a few weeks ago to get their process going, they are at the register right now, so I am hoping all goes well.  Other than that, I am just enjoying missionary life as I havent been trunky the last few weeks, ahah.  But have a good week, and be member missionaries, we really need them.

Love,

Elder Anthony Holt

Well this week was super fast.... (6-6-16)

Yeah, so we went to Beira this week for zone conference, that was cool, but being out of the area for 3.5 days really makes the week fly by.  On monday, tuesday, and wednesday we were able to teach a good amount of people.  I was really happy to get the work done on those days.  I feel like it was the most effective I have worked in a long time.  Every area is super different, and so you have to learn how to work the different areas.  I definitely think this area has been the most challenging for me.  In my old area, if I had a ton of investigators I felt really good about myself and that we were doing a lot.  But here, even though we are teaching a ton of people, I just never feel like I have done all that I can do.  I always feel like there is more to do, and I am always so tired. I am really getting tired of being so flipping tired all the time, but I guess it is whatever.  Our investigators are going well.  We have an investigator who needs to get an ID card and yesterday she was sick, but her husband came, and we were able to get one of the documents they needed through another investigator of ours.  But it was sunday and we gave it to him, and he started freaking out because he was so excited that they could finally progress towards baptism.  He said to my comp, "can I go get her ID right now"  my comp responded, "no, they are closed on sunday, but you can go first thing tomorrow morning"  he was so excited he looked like a little kid on christmas morning.  It was super cool to see an investigator so excited.  We need to find some more, that is for sure.  But we have another investigator who is the neice of a family we are teaching, the family stopped progressing, but this girl kept coming to church, and so we began teaching her.  She is 17 and the first two times we taught her we could just feel how sad she was.  It was really depressing, but the last few visits it seems that she is getting progressively happier, and last night she told us that she wants to serve a mission some day, so that is super cool.  We had a good time in Beira, learning from President and the AP's, when we were giving our zone training there was one part where we could not explain what we wanted, and it was so frustrating.  Thankfully we have a president who is way more in tune with the spirit than we are and he got up and in 45 seconds explained a concept that we took 10 minutes trying to get our zone to understand.  We are super happy as we see our zone progressing, we really think that we are getting better, and we are super happy to be a part of it.  I also got to see some stuff around Beira, so that was nice, and seeing the other missionaries was a good time too.  It is always depressing flying back to Nampula, because just when you get used to being around people white people again, you have to fly back to be alone, haha.  But I love it up here, and it felt like coming home, and I didnt get sick this time so I couldnt have asked for more.  I want to express my gratitude for the atonement, and the knowledge that tomorrow I can be better than I was today.  That is really the hope that we all need to have. Too many people in this world are stuck thinking, I am just this way and that is how I have to be.  But I know that I have a Perfect Father in Heaven, who sacrificed His perfect son, so that I could become perfect one day as well.  So even though I might not be perfect, I have a perfect desire to be perfect, so I am grateful for the atonement that makes that possible.  I love you all and I love this gospel, I am so grateful that God has restored it to the earth today, and that he guides us today. I miss you all and love you more.

My homies at home (5-30-16)

Bom Dia for me, and Boa noite for you.  This was a good week.  Elder Taukiuvea and I worked and we found and we did some baptizing too.  But yeah, to be honest, I really dont remember anything crazy.  We did normal missionary work, so I guess I could send you my weekly numbers or something, but that probably wouldnt mean much to you all.  We have been prepping our families for baptism, and they are getting closer and closer.  We have one family Arlindo and Virginia, they are a cool family.  They live in a little mud house an hour and a half away, but they come to church every week.   They are pretty poor, but that is normal here I guess.  They like everyone are having difficulty arranging money to get married.  He needed to travel to get a birth certificate and to buy the certificate and pay the trave would be about $17US, just to give you an idea, but that is enough to feed a family of 5-6 for like 2 weeks, and he didnt have that money, and we didnt really know what to do.  But a few weeks ago we got a church headquarters reference for a guy, except he lives super far from the city in a district called moma.  But he was coming into Nampula that weekend so we set up an appointment and we visited him, he liked the message and we were able to give him a book of mormon and stuff and he went back, and he lives so far away that we can't expect him to come to church, it is like 8 hours by chapa.  But we found out he was from the same district where Arlindos documents were, so we called and sent some money and he bought the documents and sent them with a friend coming into Nampula, it was super cool to see that the Lord will help us.  I dont know that this man will ever progress, but at least he was key in helping someone else with desire get baptized.  This saturday we had the baptism of Jose and Euzebio, that is a whale of a story in itself.  We went to fill up the font on saturday morning, and would you believe, the font has a hole in it, like a big hole.  So we run around town trying to find something to use to patch it.  We find something, run home set it up, and start filling.  Then we check the font an hour later, and water has stopped flowing.  We found out the water company hasnt been pumping water for a few days so our 2500 liter tank was empty and the font was no where near full.  To make matters worse it was draining because our patch hadnt held super well.  We were frantically calling trying to figure out if there was a river that was deep enough out of town that we could get to or something, but there was nothing, and we couldnt think of any places with a pool.  Finally someone tells us to try this club, so we go.  This was 30 minutes before the baptism was supposed to start, but we get there and this stupid portuguese man tells us we have to go and that we cant use the pool, we asked who he was to tell us that, and he was no one related to the club, he just wanted to be a jerk, so I told him off (I am repenting of that one), and we left.  But we checked the pool one more time and found some old guard dude.  We talked to him and he said we could use the pool becuase it was a baptism and he was a pastor and knew that it was important, so we did it, and it felt really good to spite that prideful portuguese sucker.  But yeah, so we baptized them in a public pool it was pretty cool.  That is about all that happened.  For a spiritual thought, I was reading in the Book of Mormon, the account of nephi going back to get the plates with his brother, and I was super confused, like why didnt they just get the plates on the way out instead of the 116 mile travel just to go back, I am pretty sure God knew he was going to want them to get the plates, and of everbody, Lehi probably could have negotiated for them way better.  But yeah, I was confused, but then as I read, I got to 1 Nephi chapter 5:8(i think that is the verse), where it says that sariah had been complaining against Lehi and not trusting in the Lord, but then when her sons got back she said that she now knew with surety that her husband was called of God.  So had they just brought the plates the first time she wouldnt have had that surety and could have doubted at a more crucial point of the journey.  So yeah, sometimes God prompts us, or lets us suffer a little bit, to prove to us that he has a plan.  So have faith, and I love and miss you all.

Love,

Elder Anthony Holt

Baptism Pic

Cool Sunset in the Area