Happy New year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s 2004(here) but 2012 for you guys (The year the world ends… Jk! I hope…) I hope you both had an amazing new year! It’s not really the new year in Ethiopia so I just crashed and we didn’t celebrate or anything. Kind of weird. Last year I was in Uganda and we watched the fireworks from our roof and it actually felt like a new year. I hope this one is great and guess what, I’ll see yall this year!

Uganda has been good. It is so hot here. I didn’t mean to confuse you. I am here for a Zone Leader Council and it was great. We learned so much from president and they set a new mission goal of 2012 baptisms for 2012.
I have been making sure to keep a journal but I’ve only done it twice a week and sometimes only once. I did spend a little bit of time on New Years Eve thinking about the last year and all that I’ve seen and done. I did make sure to write it all down in my journal too. It was a great year and it’s always possible to have a greater year than the one last!

Wow, I can’t believe the weather is so warm there! In the evenings here it gets down to the 30’s…. I’m glad we have a hot shower here finally but it sucks walking outsides in the morning to get to it.

Well the week has been good. I’m adjusting to the new area but it’s pretty awesome. We have a car which I’ll send you a picture of next week, the home has hot showers and power (usually), the branch is great, and we get to be around President Parrish who doesn’t like it when I dance for him in the office.

It’s weird up here, as zone leaders we are doing a lot of extra things like bringing needs to the areas all over Addis but we end up with more lessons and baptismal dates than the rest of the zone… I don’t know why since I’m new. I hope we can help the other missionaries areas as well as keep ours going.

We also have a great family that is a referral from a guy named D. He is awesome and has a cool conversion story. He had found a Book of Mormon in some language from Ghana on the street and bought it because he recognized the word “Jesus Christ”. He could never read it because he didn’t know that language but a little later he got a Joseph Smith pamphlet and read his testimony and felt the same way. He found that Joseph Smith had the true church of Christ and that is what D was looking for. Well he found the church and lo and behold, they had the very same book he had in his home, but in his language, and it was FREE! Long story short he loves the Book of Mormon and was baptized a few weeks ago and is now bringing in some awesome referrals.

Now, the family is from him and the father’s name is S. His wife is Orthodox and her parents are Priests in that church or something but she doesn’t believe it and we gave them a baptismal date on Saturday night for the 22 of January. They were pumped for it and they all came to church on Sunday. They have 3 kids and 2 of them are over 8. I’m excited for them to continue being awesome members.

Also, I was so happy to hear that the Rastafarian guy I was teaching in Awassa is moving up here to be with his family. He’s been staying away from drugs and has come to church the last 3 weeks down there. I can’t wait to meet his family and hopefully see them all baptized together! What blessings the Lord provides.

We also get to teach Sudanese people up here and they are such strong members. They are literally giants as well as metaphorically in faith. They always look very good in suits and stuff on Sundays for church. We are preparing a lot of these big brethren for the Priesthood as well as a guy named D for baptism on the 22 as well.

Well there are a lot of cool people we have been teaching so I won’t mention them all. It is also awesome being able to serve the other missionaries. I love being able to help them with their contacting and teaching as well as getting them their physical needs. The missionaries here are awesome and I look forward to learning from them.

Sunday was also a good day. We were just there for sacrament meeting but it was very powerful. The Branch President shared his families conversion story and there were other great testimonies. There were a lot of our investigators there as well. Actually all the people we have with baptismal dates came. We only were there for sacrament though before we headed to the airport to catch our plane.

The flight was awesome as usual, but Uganda is so hot! I love it here nevertheless. We had to be home by 6 P.M. here because of the new year though so we played risk with the AP’s and some other zone leaders. Man, I love board games!

We had the trainings all of Monday and it was a spiritually uplifting meeting. We learned a lot about how to better our zones and missionaries as well as our focus is more on families and not just numbers. They set the mission goal of 2012 baptisms for 2012 and for each companionship to have 5 baptisms a transfer. I thought it was awesome. The funny thing though is I’m the one of the 3 oldest missionaries there so everyone was kind of quiet and sucking up a little. As you know me, I speak my mind so I thought it was kind of fun being able to speak my mind on some of the subjects. I really try to be genuine and the same person in front of President as I am in front of the other guys. Afterwards I was just telling president sorry for kind of debating one of the goals we were trying to set and he just said “oh well we just expect that of you”. I’m glad he welcomes that kind of stuff haha.