Do You Paint Cows? 8/2010

Several months before we left Texas we were invited to our dear friends Steve

and MBB's. (as I affectionately call her). MBB had brushed off her painting

tools and Steve began to show interest in painting so they were both creating
some beautiful pieces of art.  MBB had just done some pictures of some oranges
that were very nice.  My Steve said I really like them but Steve asked ...Do you
paint cows? The farm boy was coming out in him. :) Our dear sweet friend MBB
remembered that and when we left for Canada she painted us this beautiful
picture in titled ..."Do You Paint Cows".  She had it packages and sent to us. 
What a fun surprise to have the FedEx guy knock at our door! We both LOVE it!! 
It not only is a fantastic job but what a treat to have her art in our home.  We
were both so touch that she would do this for us.  It hangs proudly in Steve's
office right as you walk into our home. We had a visitor recently ask us where
we got that picture as he also loved it. MBB is now an "internationally placed
artist".  This is not only a gift from the heart...it is a gift we will always treasure. 
Thank You MBB..we absolutely love it and YOU!

South Africa: Hey! 8/30/2010

Hey Family!

Guess what, I got mail!!! It was so exciting, but I have realized that I don't need you to write your emails on dear elder. Dear elder is amazing for letters, but it is confusing for emails and I usually print the emails off anyway. But other than that, thanks for the letters! I have not received the package yet, but we will also get mail next week, we have to drive to the office. (that's what usually happens, we go forever without mail and then get to check it twice back to back)

Well sounds like everyone is doing good! Canada sounds pretty fun and Grant continues to make me laugh ha ha and you haven't started school yet!? Have I really only been in South Africa for a month!? HA Let me know how school is going.

Dad I was finally able to track down those questions you sent me, so I will go through those. I may have already answered some, if not all, but Just in case I will answer them.

1. Am I happy?

Well judging from some of the letters I read, I must of made it sound like I was miserable the first week or two. Not the case. I was definitely home sick, but I got over it. Yes I am happy. I really starting to get attached to the people I serve with and for. I had my first confirmation yesterday in church. I was pretty nervous because I could not say this ladies last name. Her name starts with a sound I did not know my mouth was capable of making, so I spent all my time before hand concentrating of the name, and then when I stood up in front of the ward I was like oh man...I have no idea what to say! So I said her name and it flowed SO well! and then I let the spirit guide for the rest of the blessing. It was a really neat experience.

2. Tell us about Elder Onsongo (my companion), his family, and their history in the Church.

Well Elder Onsongo is from Kenya. The lord has a sense of humor and he put me with someone I have almost nothing in common with, but It has been a good experience. We have our differences, but We also have a testimony of the gospel, and a willingness to share it in common. We are getting along well. He is a recent convert. He grew up very religious in the Catholic, and Roman Catholic, and he knows the bible inside and out. Very smart guy, but about 3 years ago he met the missionaries and joined the church. That is something I have really noticed lately. The people that know the bible for themselves and do not rely on a preacher to teach them seem to accept the gospel pretty well seeing as how the bible talks about the falling away, the restoration, etc. I do not however know too much about his family other than that all accept for one of them joined the church at different times after he did.

3. Do the two of us lif\ve in the flat alone?

No, we have a 4 man district and we all live together. I have really enjoyed this. Elder Kelly and Littlefield are the other Elders in our flat. Elder Kelly is the man. He is from Australia and also a recent convert. He actually joined the church the same day that Elder Onsongo did 3 years ago. He however has a much different background. He is big into motor cross (however you spell that) and he is in the Australian army. He is very down to earth and good with people. He is the one that loves my pens....so much that I am left without my pens..ha ha.

Elder Littlefield is from California. Honestly, I don't even know how to describe him. But he is the one that wants the balloons so that he can make balloon animals? so...yea, he is a really nice guy. Like the rest of the district, he is very strong in the gospel. Everyone in the flat has a strong testimony and we get along pretty well.
I need to move faster I am running out of time!

4. Mission President and his wife.

My mission President is the man. I do not know if I talked about my first interview with him or not, but we spent a lot of time talking about how he was the CEO of American express. He is also close friends with the president of the LDS business college. We had a lot to talk about in our interview, he is a great guy. I do not know much about the mission before I came here, but apparently he turned this mission around. I do not however know much, if anything about this wife. I have only seen her once or twice and that was for a very short time. Ill just assume that she is just as awesome?

5. Do I feel safe?

ha ha funny question...Yes, yes I do. It is not as dangerous as people were making it sound before I left, but then again it is not Keller, Texas. It is important to recognize the danger could be there, but it can be avoided.  I have areas within my area that we stay clear of, we have a couple on their mission here that are over security, and most important, I am set apart as a servant of the Lord, so I am protected by that, and the people know who the missionaries are and they are usually pretty friendly. But to sum it up, yes, It is safe. I will not even get robbed in this area let alone physically harmed, so you have no need to worry. (oh I posted a couple pictures of my biggest danger, the dogs ha ha, but this area has very little dog bites, so once again, no worries)

6. The ward and Branch?
Well we have 1 ward and 1 branch in our area. Daveyton ward and a singles ward branch (which has a couple white people in it ha ha). The ward is good. It could use a lot of work though. They are very divided and no one knows who the members are. They are not unified, so That is something I am trying to work on even though I don't have any control over the ward. It is also lacking with the priesthood, so our main focus is to find and teach father led families.

We also are trying to open up a branch on the other side of my area, we had our first meeting yesterday ( a mini church) and we only had 7 people there, but it went well. We are going to do a little tracking there to find people, but for the most part they are very accepting there.)
7. What is a typical day like?
8. Tell about an investigator?
for the sake of time I will answer these next week. I am almost out of time.

9. What on earth did I mean by the comment about hearing from me every month or every other month?

Well I should be able to email in every area I am in, every week or two, but I was referring to receiving mail. In a large portion of the mission they live many many many hours away from the mission so they only get mail during transfers IF someone near them is getting transferred. So that would mean I get mail about every 6 weeks. In this area I get mail about...once every two and a half to 3 weeks. give or take a week.

Oh random facts:

I posted a picture of my first chicken foot.

and I came across these "prophetic insights" that sister Boyer gave to me before I left and it was like Christmas day! they were so cool! I only have the ones for the new test. but they were awesome, the whole flat was in on reading some of those! So thank you sister Boyer!

If you want specific questions answered please bullet point them like dad did, that was really helpful. I usually get kicked off the computer and THEN realize the questions I forgot to answer ha ha

Oh man, I only have a min or two for my thought of the week!

My thought for this week was overcoming the desires of the body and yielding to the desires of the spirit. I was going to get way into it, but i have no time. but as we read in Mosiah 3 19, the natural man is an enemy to God. This is a very true statement. The natural man desires things of this world. The natural man is the one who says eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. In 2 Nephi 2:27-29 and 2 Nephi 10:23 and 24 it talks about this and how we need to act upon the desires of the spirit. Well I really cant get into it more. I am getting kicked off.


Love you family! Thanks for your letters and your support!

Elder Williams

Kananaskis Counrty! 8/28/2010

One thing we have learned here is that when you have a beautiful day you

better take advantage of it!  So we left all of the work that needed to be done

last Saturday and headed out to see what we could find.  We are always finding

new and beautiful places.  Banff is for sure the place that everyone talks about

but there are treasures everywhere you look.  Kananaskis and one of the many

ski resorts is only about 30 minutes from our home. The kids started school on

Tuesday so they wanted to play and play we did.  

You see signs about bears every time you go out but I had never seen one that

said "closed due to bear activity" What exactly does that mean??  For me it

means GET IN YOUR CAR!!   

They had the Kananaskis Delta Resort with this great commons area to play in. 

It would be a great place for a family reunion.

This was a great little fishing spot.  The water was so clear you could see fish

everywhere.  Grant and dad were not prepared to fish but I think they will

be next time.

I must say that I still miss Texas but I am so thankful that we have had this

opportunity to live around and see such beautiful things. 

Our Visitor 8/16/2010

No Blake we did not catch the porcupine...nor did we try to!! 

We had this visitor come to the house and Steve and Grant were

so taken with it.  I have heard that they can shoot their quills pretty

far so I was happy to have a long distance view. 

South Africa: Hello Family 8/23/1010

Hello Family!

How is everyone doing? Cami um...mother informed me that you were speeding during your driving test?? why exactly is that?

How was Texas? How long did you stay there? Please tell me you had some delicious Texas food!

Dad, did the mission president really give you the email of someone else?? How did he feel getting a bunch of mail for an Elder Williams? Speaking of mail I have not been able to check mail for 3 weeks now! Its kind of killing me, and looking ahead at our schedule it looks like it will be another two to three weeks before we are able to get our mail. Dad how is gospel Principles class going? What kind of things are you teaching and studying right now?

Tyler, How has school been, you getting good grades? Kaylee, have you found a replacement job yet better than overstock? and did you get your new sweet couches?

Carly and Joel how are you doing? How was Canada? How is school, and Joel when do you find out about medical schools?

Grant, did you catch that porcupine (however you spell that) and keep it as a pet? Speaking of animals, we had a dinner appointment with the YSA Bishop the other day and we were talking about animals. Turns out that South Africans rats are the size of cats? Apparently they are all over the place I just haven't seen one yet! and we had a huge discussion about snakes and spiders. Lets just hope I don't see the snakes, and the spiders are supposed to be the size of your hand, and they chase your shadow because they think they can hide in your shadow, when really that just means they end up chasing you!

Momma, have you unpacked all the boxes yet and made Canadian friends?

Sister..have you learned how to drive stick shift? Hopefully you are taking good care of the civic!

Things are going well in South Africa! This week was not nearly as crazy as last week, in fact it kind of flew by because we had a TON of service projects this week. But Mormon helping hands got canceled because of a big strike that's going on in South Africa right now by the school teachers and doctors. Apparently people are dying in the hospitals right now because of this doctor strike. Hopefully they work that out soon.

We started our district garden this week! It is SOO COOL!! we have our own plot of land behind the church and we dug it up and leveled it this week. Once we figure out that whole water thing we are going to plant seeds, but we had a district debate about whether an apple seed taken straight out of an apple will grow or not (something I have ALWAYS wanted to know!), so I made a little section where I planted apple seeds. I will send more pictures next week when we have the final garden set up. Oh but when we were planting our garden there was this animal whole that we dug up and came to the conclusion that there was no animal inside of it, until the next day we showed up to our garden and there was a fairly large, freshly dug hole in the exact center of our garden, so next week I should have a story on that one ha ha.

We had our first wave of baptisms this week! we Baptised 5 people. It was supposed to be 7, but we did not feel 2 of the people were ready yet, so we moved them to next week. Before we baptised these people, there were two couples that needed to get married in order to fulfill the law of chastity, so we had a wedding on Saturday. This is my third wedding by the same marriage counselor here, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no one more awkward than this man hahaha, you would die if you were to see one of these weddings ha ha. Just take my word for it, its always an adventure!

Sunday after the Baptisms we were informed that we had two dinner appointments scheduled on top of each other which is a HUGE problem here. If you remember me telling you about the food, they like to feed the missionaries like triple what a normal person eats and you HAVE to finish the entire thing! We showed up to the first appointment and turns out that she thought we had 6 elders when we really o0nly had 4, so not only did we have to PACK in all the food for ourselves, but then we had to somehow find room for the food she cooked for the other two elders! It was quite the event! Words can not express how much food this was. After finishing this meal we waddled to the car and drove to our next Dinner appointment. I was about to die, but we had to get all this food down as well. I somehow managed to get all my plate down, but then realized that one of the Elders hit a brick wall halfway through his plate and simple could not finish. We kept coaching him on with our glances of "you BETTER finish that", but it got to the point where he physically could not do it, so when they were looking away we quickly switched plates and I had to finish the half of his plate also! That one was too close for comfort. Long story short, I'm getting a belly on me.

Scripture of the week: All of 2 Nephi 2! Such a good chapter. Especially vs 17-18 where it talks about Satan and how he "sought also the misery of all mankind." Because it is SO true! I see that every single day here. Read over that chapter. and pay special attention to vs 24 also. Sometimes we think we need something, but really, the lord knows what we need more than we know what we need.

Tomorrow I have zone leader exchanges. I was going to go to their area and experience a town, but they wanted me to stay for some reason, so hopefully I don't get too lost in my area!

Not sure if I mentioned this above, but mission tour was Tuesday. We had Elder Renland of the 70 come talk to us. That was a great lesson and we learned about how to teach simple, short, and clear. Sometimes we feel that to teach a principle it needs to take 45 min. Elder Renland taught us how to do any principle in 4 to 5 min. Simple and clear so there is no way you can get confused!

Well family, thanks for your letters! I um..have not been able to check them yet, but I'm sure they will be waiting for me in a few weeks so thanks! Let me know if there is anything I can do for anyone!

Stay safe, CTR, Love you all!

Elder Blake Williams

South Africa: Crazy Week 8/16/2010

Hello Family!

How is everyone doing? Why are Carly and Joel in Canada? How is everything? The mowing of the yard still going well? How was your birthday Cami?

Well This was a crazy week. We got a call from the Mission President a few days ago and he told my companion and I to go to the Temple this morning at 10 am, and to not tell anyone where and why we were going. It left us in question all week because the temple is closed until tomorrow! Well we got there this morning and there were about 10 other elders. There was a high class meeting going on with some high ranking government officials, area presidency, members of the 70, and some other well known people from South Africa that the church was honoring for helping with humanitarian things and for helping the fight against pornography. We Elders were used as traffic control ha ha, I'm assuming it was so secretive because of the security and high ranking people that were there? Who knows, but that almost took over my chance to email this week!

Anyway! This has been a pretty exciting week! I debated telling this story until I got back, but It was not to dangerous, so I will go ahead and share! A couple days ago my district (the 4 of us) were on our way to a service project and on our way we passed this shack/house that was on fire. Like...flame out the roof on fire! No one was outside doing anything, so naturally we flipped around and hurried over there to make sure no one was inside. The SWEETEST part was when my companion ran up to the door and kicked the door down with flames and smoke going EVERYWHERE! It was a seen straight out of a movie! By this time there were others around, but only a couple were helping us, but we got a bunch of buckets of water and were rushing into this building to put out the fire! (no one was inside) but we were still rushing all over the place to put out the flames! It was SWEET! and mother do not stress it was not THAT dangerous only a 3 on the scale of 10, but we became neighborhood hero's and then once the fire was out we walked away like nothing happened. It was SWEET!

But moving on, Our district is starting a garden! The church has a bunch of land behind it for gardening and we have a half hour to an hour every day in the morning where we cant do to much, so We are going to start gardening and then when we get food we are going to give it to some of our investigators that could use it! I'm pretty excited for that, but that's not the most exciting part of the week. Our companionship has come to the conclusion that before I am transferred we will have opened up a branch in our area! I was telling you earlier that alot of the area is poor and very far from the church, and yet we are getting many people interested out in that area, so we are going to start holding small meetings every Sunday starting this coming Sunday and then when we have enough people regularly attending we will have sacrament there. Once it grows a little more we will make it a Branch! I'm way excited for this and have already made drawings for our future building! ha ha

This Saturday we have Mormon helping hands and we are also marring two of our investigator couples. That will be a full day. Sunday we are going to have about 5-7 baptisms. 3 of the people we are baptising is that family I sent you pictures of! I'm so excited to see them baptised because they are so excited about the gospel! He will definitely be the branch president some day!

Tomorrow is mission tour. Honestly I don't know what that is so I will have to fill you in later.

Things are going well here! Africa does not cease to amaze me. It is a different world. When I get home make sure you re teach me driving skills, hygiene , and how to properly shake hands. All of that went out the window the second I stepped off the plane.

How is everyone doing? Mom and dad how did your talks go? OH! before I forget, one of the priests here is asking for a BYU shirt? is there any way we could track one of those down? and then My companion once one of those scripture marking rulers/squaring thing that I have if you can track one down and put it in the package. (Caroline will know what that is....hopefully ha ha) If not no worries at all. And no rush for that package. You can probably just send it for Christmas? I can't have the others feeling jealous. They literally don't get letters, accept for email.

Alright well I need to go! Let me know if there is anything I can do for you! Scripture of the week: The entire last chapter of 1 Nephi.

Love you all!

Elder Blake Williams

Oh PS Cami, We just started teaching this girl your age yesterday because her parents are about to get baptised and she is being rebellious and not listening to them etc. So we talked her into meeting with us and I felt like I was talking to you and telling you to listen to your parents ha ha not saying you DON'T listen to your parents, but if you DON'T then you SHOULD!

PSS. I got my first African gift for myself. I found a guy on the side of the road who carves wood and he made me a cool giraffe!

ONE OF OUR FAVORITE THINGS!! 8/2010

Need I say more??!!