Oh what's up 4 months!?

So ya yesterday was the 4 month mark! Can hardly believe it! It seemed like last week I was saying it was the 3 month mark. But I guess that's what happens when you are just so ridiculously busy all the time.

So just to get some random things out of the way really quick. Sidewinder buses. I forgot to talk about them when I went down to bulawayo. There are buses here that have horrible alignment problems. We call them Sidewinders. They really stick out far! Like I'm not even joking. The driver has to look out the front window and his side window. They will be driving along being in their lane and then halfway in yours going straight.

Oh ya, so we just got a new assistant to the president this side. His name is Elder Lauaki. He's Tongan. But from Seattle. He is the only boy in his family and has like 10 sisters. But he's funny. We like to play jokes here in the office. And of course I do computer jokes so I was just going to do one and just sent a request to his computer to remotely shut it down and it has a message that said something like: "OH NO! WHAT DID YOU DO?! I GOT A VIRUS! I NEED TO SHUTDOWN NOW!" And he was freaking out and didn't know what to do. I gave it like 2 minutes and went over and acted like I was typing a bunch of stuff and aborted the shutdown. And was asking him all these questions. And then later I sent another one saying the virus was going to make it explode and he was getting up and going out of the room. We were all laughing so hard. I also changed the name of my computer to SYSTEM and I send him messages from my computer and he thinks the computer is talking to him. From my office I can hear things his is saying and then send him a message. And he's always like what the crap? This computer is scary it's talking to me! He still hasn't caught on yet. We'll see what happens. But ya good times XD.

Anyways still teaching. We have somewhere around 7 baptisms coming up on the 1st of May. We have way too many people to teach than we have time for. Like we are really struggling to visit the people we need to. And the funny thing is that we didn't tract or anything. These are all people who came to us. Or just showed up at church.

We were teaching Gogo this week. (Gogo is what they call grandmas) and she has been struggling for a while now. She says she gets no sleep and she can't pray and things. That every time she tries her mind is just blank and she feels like she can't. But she says she can't sleep because she doesn't know what to do with these kids that she's been left with. Her daughter died in December and left her with 2 mentally handicapped kids. And she was going on this week about how she doesn't know what she's going to do and does know how to take care of these kids and what what. But we were visiting with her and we were listening to her go on for a while and then I stopped her and just said Gogo, you are doing it. You think you can't but you are. The kids are happy and healthy and everyone is still here. Well that's the condensed story of what I told her but we left that night and came back a couple days later and she was much happier and she was thanking us and saying that she is so much happier now and that she can pray. And that she's much nicer now too. She said before that if the kids would do something, oh she would yell and beat them with a rod. She said everyone knew when gogo got upset nobody talked not even her husband because they feared the wrath! But she says now she is nice to people and doesn't yell anymore. It was pretty cool. I've had to shorten the story quite a bit for time and space reasons, but that's the essential story. It was cool.

But that's about it for this week. I will send more stories next week.

~Elder Vanderlinden