Its been a heck of week. Wow. So Monday we drove around the new elders around and we had the New Elders training. Pretty routine, that’s—I think—the 4th time I have heard that training. Its a really good one though about the doctrine of Christ. President does a great job and it always gives me new insights on the gospel of Christ and how to teach it from the scriptures.
Tuesday we flew out to Port Elizabeth for our exchanges in the Kwano zone. The Kwano zone covers mostly the township areas outside PE. It was a pretty interesting experience.
So I was on exchanges with Elder Jones, our Australian friend from the MTC. I love that kid, he is like a 300 pound toddler. He beat me up a few times and kept sucking me into conversations that lasted till 2 am. I still have to get up at 6:30 so I was pretty toasted this week .The really interesting part was when we were planning Thursday morning, an Elder who is being trained came in to our room in the zone leader’s flat and told us that his trainer has been developing an inappropriate relationship with a Young Single Adult sister in the ward. Nothing too crazy just that they were always there, he was always on the phone with her, and he had seen him hold her hand. So we said OK, and, assuming that this was a little above our pay grade, decided to wait till we left that afternoon to call President for him to sort it out (we knew he was in a training that morning). So we waited till we are on the road, headed to the airport. President said if what the companion said was true then the Elder was going to get ETed [emergency transferred] and he told us to go talk to the elder. We told him we were on our way to the airport, and he told us to cancel our flight. So then we drove back to talk to them. The elder who was being accused denied doing anything, but didn’t really have much of an explanation about why his companion was saying all these things. So here we have this situation, the greenie, who is clearly uncomfortable ratting on his father, and the trainer who is denying everything. We are questioning the trainer pretty exhaustively, and trying everything from attempting to bribe him with fried chicken to searching through his phone. The irony is that while this was happening, President’s phone was off because he was seeing Alastair, a meeting I had arranged for him. So for like two hours we were just not really sure what to do. Finally we got a hold of President, who told us to move him to the Zone Leaders in PE. So we take him back to his flat to pack, and he tells us he is not leaving without his camera, which he tells us is at a members house. We ask which member it is, and surprise, surprise, its the YSA sister. So obviously thats not going to work. So me and the greenie go get it, and then we come back and drive him to PE, a good 30 min drive, and have to drive back, so we get back at 10:30. What a day. It was weird too because one of the zone leaders was totally eavesdropping on us when the greenie was talking to us, like Elder Jones saw there was someone at the door and I got up all quite like and opened the door and the elder about fell in the room. And then he told the trainer at least a heads up. Sketchy stuff out there in Kwano. Then we flew back into Cape Town that morning and went directly from the airport to the Mowbray chapel for our training and interviews. And then that night we started our exchange with some Zone Leaders in Cape Town. Busy busy busy.
Interviews with President was really good, we talked a lot about school and what I should major in. He basically told me for Law I could major in just about whatever but he gave me some good guidelines and expressed his confidence in my ability to succeed at BYU.
This week has been a pretty big learning curve for me. I think now, just about half-way through my term as an Assistant, I have figured out our job is basically to solve all the problems we can, as soon as we can, and only after we take a stab at it do we ask President for help, because what happens when we come to him with a problem is he tells us to fix it. We also talked about that in interviews.
Other awesome stuff is that Mondekazi is getting baptized on sunday, she passed her interview with Elder Madsen Sunday morning. I really have fun teaching her, she is pretty funny. We found out her that most of the reason she hasn’t been baptized is because she only in the last few years moved to live with her mom, previous to that she was living with her grandparents in the villages, so she didn’t speak English until recently. Her english is perfect now.
Today we went golfing, it was really windy.
This week is going to be pretty chill, we will be in town for all of it and only one exchange, mostly just getting ready for transfers. We went through the board today. One interesting thing is that my companion is going to be Elder Ndlovu, from my transfer, something that really caught me by surprise. A lot of people thought he was going to be an Assistant a while back but then he kinda got into some trouble. So I have some apprehensions about that. Anyway, well that was the week. Love you all!
-Elder Martin
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