From Nelspruit, South Africa

Dear Family,

I cannot believe how much you are traveling lately! Back in the day we would travel like once a year and it would be a two day road trip! Now the family is flying all over the place every week. It is exciting to hear about all that goes on and I enjoyed the pictures you sent me. Congratulations Carly!

I attached a few photo's of my own today, so I hope you can open them. Three of them are from my road trip with Elder Brey. I wanted to take more photos but a missionary road trip does not allow you to stop and take all day exploring sites so these are just a few snap shots along the way. Also, the second picture was from one of my highlights of the week. I bought a bonsai African tree for my desk. Elder Brey kind of/did have a lady back home who he forgets to write for 5 months at a time. He forgot her birthday, so decided to include something African inside his letter, so while we were shopping for something African I found this tree for myself for about 3 US dollars. He says I am too excited about it, but I like it.

Elder Brey also got me a little sick this week. It was a weird sick because I didn't feel sick, but I completely lost my voice for 2 days and he said that I sounded like I was crying if I tried to talk, so I didn't really talk for 2 days....Which actually is not too hard when people don't want you to teach them. I am better now though, and we started teaching 7 new people this week. Two of which are 7th Day Adventists so they love to bash with us. I hate bashing because it goes nowhere, and if you ever give into bashing you just prove the people wrong, they get mad, you leave, no one wins. It was kind of funny though because we were talking about prophets and how you tell a true prophet. He said that 7th day people have a prophet and they predicted that the second coming was in the year 1844, but of course it wasn't so then the prophet said that it was the right day but the wrong event. The true event was Christ moving from one holy place to another holy place? Stories like this just prove to me how true the church is. But all we can do is leave people with the Book of Mormon and tell them to read and pray about it.

We get dinner appointments ALL the time, so this week we decided to make food for two families in the ward. We decided to make Mexican food (since this area is rich and you can buy American products). It was pretty nice because both families really enjoyed it and neither of the families had ever eaten a tortilla before we fed them one.

On a side note, I was supplied with about 60 new born baby kits from the church for the district to give out in hospitals and things such as that. It is neat to have these because these are similar to the kits that I was putting together before I left on the mission. At the Churches humanitarian place you put together these kits for people, and now I get to pass some of them out. I gave half of them to the other companionship and then we have half, but apparently I have 60 more coming.

Passing them out has proved to be a process like everything else in life. We went to the hospital to see if we could donate them to needy families and the hospital told us that we would have to send a letter to some CEO requesting permission to donate them. We went and typed up a very legit letter and then delivered it to the CEO. The next day we got a call from the CEO telling us to come pick up her response letter (why could she not tell us over the phone.....I haven't a clue). We got her letter of acceptance and now have to call this other guy just to get permission to give away free baby kits. Good thing I have been working a lot on my patience while on my mission.

We had the same thing happen with obtaining a map of Nelspruit. Elder Brey and I tracked down a map the size of our entire wall of Nelspruit which we hung up in the room so we can keep track of where we have tracked. It is large enough to see each plot in the entire city, so whenever we go trackting we keep track of which houses were nice but not interested at the time, houses that let us in (few of those), and then the houses that are mean as anything and don't want us back ever. This is proving to work really well because we can look at a street now and see when we trackted it and then we can see which houses did not answer/ should try again, etc.

Getting that map was a pretty funny story as well. We started with one guy who told us we could not get one, to another lady who said the same thing, to another lady who said we could get it but that it would be 1,000 rand (a lot), to making friends with that lady and then getting this map for free.


Both of you (parents, the only ones that email me anymore.....not even Grant) asked about how District leader is going. Not too much to report there. We are all doing well, I'm just trying not to be one of those controlling District Leaders that you often see in the mission field. This weeks district meeting I focused on Prayer and helping those we teach understand the true relationship we have with Heavenly Father. Explaining this in an attempt to make those we teach have sincere prayers when asking about the Book of Mormon in Prayer.

I am just praying that everyone will continue to get along. Both of the companionship's get along with their companions really well, although both of us have had our points this week where we butt heads a bit. This is natural and happens with each new companionship but I hope all works out for the best. Nothing is worse than having to sort out companionship problems.

All is well though

Thank you for everything!
Love you all

Elder Blake Williams