"It is truly families like these that make my time in India well worth it!"

September 28, 2011

The internet cafe ran out of computers on which I could type, so I am typing this on a laptop. Feels so good!

I will stay District Leader until the end of the Transfer (October 20-something). Then it's up in the air. I could be District Leader again. But personally I think that I'm going to get transferred out of Malviyah Nagar. Elder Varada will be transferred out in December (That is paka [Hindi:true]). Elder Sade will finish His mission here in January, so he'll be here in the long run as well. Elder Veeraraj will probably stay here until February to help the Elders that will replace my companions. Two of the other American Elders have already left their home branch. each of them were replaced by even newer South Indian elders.

Which reminds me, we have two new American Elders! Yay. Their names are Elders Hess and Chambers. Both from Utah. Just briefly met them at a Specialized Training (held monthly) on Friday. They seem nice enough. Right now they're serving in Lajpat Nagar. In two weeks we're going to lose Elder Parisutham; His mission is over. He's currently serving there. Not sure what is going to happen to his companion, Elder Avans. He'll probably finish out the transfer with a Stripling Warrior. We shall soon see!

On Thursday, we went over to teach the Vijay M. family. There, we met with Neelu and his wife, Kusum. Neelu is Sister Rita’s brother, and an investigator of the church. He had previously attended our 4-family Family Home Evening. So, we sat down, and we had to improvise the lesson that we would teach them. We were going to teach the M. family about temples, but that didn’t seem appropriate with such new investigators in the room. So, we changed our plan to teach them the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This gave us a great opportunity to reteach the M. family (who were set to be confirmed the next Sunday) on Faith and Repentance, and what it means for them post-baptism. It also gave us a good excuse to further elaborate on the covenants of baptism and the Gift of the Holy Ghost – all while we had investigators in the room! Of course, the investigators were our main focus in the lesson; we tried to balance each time that we took teaching everything, from giving the definition of faith to explaining on how we can better remember our Savior in our everyday lives. All in all, it helped both families tremendously!

The M. family was confirmed this previous Sunday, and Neelu and his wife are set to be baptized on the 9th of October! I have never met such investigators as these, where I can teach members, recent converts, and investigators (who also just happen to be part-member family) at the same time! I couldn’t ask for better lessons – and everything outside of the lessons is amazing too. The children, Sam and Karen, have fun trying to teach me Hindi. Elder Sade gets along with everyone greatly. They’ve had us over for dinner a few times. And we have the best games together! I think that this will be one of my fondest memories in His mission – my time in watching these families grow!

It is truly families like these that make my time in India well worth it! I couldn't ask for better lessons!

My Hindi is getting better. In my spare time, I am regularly reading some old "Teach Yourself Hindi" books that the previous American Elders had left behind. Very helpful! I can read several words; there are only a few letters that I don't know yet. After I master the writing of it, I'll work on vocabulary and sentence structure! Right now I'm kind of combining them all. It's fun. I'll be fluent in no time!

We just celebrated a birthday of a member there. We all got to choose a dessert for a special at TGIFridays that they had. I got the Peanut Butter Brownie Ice Cream Bowl. Wow. Talk about sugar overdose! It was good, though. I greatly enjoyed it!
Unfortunately, I have to wait a week for General Conference. You will all see it on the first weekend of October. We won't. We'll need to wait until the Sunday after that (October 9, I believe) before we will receive the DVD's from Salt Lake City. So we'll wait a week. I don't know how that will affect our baptisms. But I'm not worried. Elder Sade's done this before. I'll follow his lead.

The weather is never hot here. Ever. It's always cool. Everyone thinks that I'm crazy when I say that, but they've never been to Yuma. They're never experienced REAL heat. It's supposed to be the rainy season right now. I haven't seen it rain in almost a week. I think that we might be in drought, actually. It's hot and dry. A rare combination in India. Don't quite know how to explain it. I'm not complaining though! For me, this is picture perfect weather!
That's it for this week.
Love you all!
Elder Montgomery