A Letter from Elder Williams: Happy New Year 2011

Hello Family!

Sounds like everyone is doing well, although back to real life! It was a little weird being away from family for holidays but it's alright, Christmas 2012 here we come!

Well First off, I got mail! so THANK YOU! Yes, I get grandma's letters and I have one for her as well. I also got two from the Canadian Ward. One from the Bishop's family and one from..ish, I can't remember the families name but it sounded like a YW activity... package thing, so thank you for that as well! I also got a Christmas card from the sister missionaries from the MTC! That must be SO SWEET to be able to spend all of Christmas on Temple square! You need to go hurry and visit them some time because they only have 6 months left on temple square and then they get called somewhere else.

So, it turns out that they didn't put us in a 3some after all but they put Elder Kelly's companionship in the 3some. So we now have 5 in our flat but the new missionary is not with me. His name is Elder Hill and he is from Utah. He is one transfer younger than me and he is here because Botswana would not extend his Visa. Although I will probably be transferred next Wednesday I am grateful to get to know him while he is here. It's a little scary getting missionaries from Utah because they are either the best, with their head on straight, or flat out weird as anything. Luckily Elder Hill is the man. He has his head on straight and is very obedient.

So this week was New Years, which is a large celebration here in Africa. I attached a photo of one of the Midnight activities. So what they do is they go and cut down a large tree and take it to the middle of a neighborhood and then (as you can see) decorate it with tires. The reason for this is that tires burn SO well! Setting a tree on fire is not nearly epic enough so they get TIRES! To emphasize how extreme a tire fire is, if ONE tire is lit on fire the heat from that fire will be felt from inside a car quite a distance away. The flame is huge and the smoke can be seen for miles and miles around. So as you can see from this photo, once midnight hit that would have been quite a fire! But don't worry Momma, they pull the missionaries out of their areas early on New Years Eve and we are not allowed into the area on New Years Day... so I was not able to get a photo of the actual fire. Pretty much the point of my story is that South Africa celebrates slightly different than we do back in the USA.

This week at church our Branch President was speaking about the new year and I really enjoy quotes from this man so I thought I would share with you. After everyone got up and bore testimony of how hard last year was and how they are glad they have a new year, the Branch President stood up and said "last year was tough but I can promise you that this next year will be just as tough. But is good because now we will be stronger." -just thought I would share that! ha

This week Elder Matunya and I had a pretty neat experience. We made a goal that we wanted to increase our people on date for baptism from 7 to 25 before I left in 3 weeks. To do this we have really been praying to find a family (father, mother, and kids, which is rare as anything here). We couldn't really find any but we made an appointment with this man who stayed alone and he said he stayed at "11333". We searched for a good 20 min for this home and came to the conclusion that it did not exist but before giving up we decided to check "11133" just in case he made a mistake. When we got there we found that he did not make a mistake. But no one was home, SO then we checked one of the shacks in the back yard and started talking with this father who was really interested in what we were doing. Long story short is that he invited us in and we found his wife AND 3 kids! Complete family! We taught them a short lesson and then put all 5 of them on Baptism date. Once again the Lord proved that he answers prayers.

I only have a few min left but I wanted to include a conversion stories of one of the missionaries out here so that I can have it for the future so this is my journal section...

Christmas day while going to get fishing polls from another Missionary flat Elder Kelly and I started talking with one of the missionaries from Holland and asked him for his conversion story because we heard rumor that it was pretty good. He told us this drawn out story about how he grew up in a non Christian family and how no one he grew up around really believed in God. He followed the example of his parents and did not live a very good life. One summer a couple years ago he went to work on a fishing boat with his father and while out at sea he said he had a spiritual experience while writing songs for his guitar. In this experience he came to the conclusion that he was not living a good life and that he needed to change. After the fishing trip, he looked up and purchased every book on religion he could find and read them all. (not Pastor Chris stuff, but the bible, Koran, etc.)

One day He was just sitting back watching some South Park when the episode of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon came on. (I would highly discourage watching this by the way, everything I have heard is not positive). He said that it was obviously making a joke of something as South Park does but that jokes aside he was able to see past the crude humor and see that there was probably something there. His curiosity was peaked and he ordered a copy of the Book of Mormon. He did not show much interest at first but a second group of missionaries came to see him and he told them that he knew the Book was true. The story of Joseph Smith helped him a lot because in his extensive religious research he was able to see the pattern of God calling prophets and how he does so.

He was baptized against his families will and is now a year and a half out on his mission. While being here he will probably baptize in the neighborhood of 30-60 people. There will probably be about 3 go on missions as a result of his efforts. Those 3 will take the gospel to another 30-60, and the pattern goes on!

I am out of time so I cannot expound more.

Love you all

Elder Williams