Week 4 in India: Elections & Festivals

The past week has been tough for missionary work because of the elections and its the beginning of festival season here so all the Hindu's are going crazy and we pretty much cant go outside. We are not allowed to wear ties and tags at all for the next week or two because of all the festivals. We have still found ways to reach out to those investigators we would really like to teach. One example is Sister Lakshmi who lives is Bowenpally. She was ready for baptism a couple weeks ago but she kept going to visit her native village and that would cause her to miss Sunday and that kinda resets that baptism process( We need her to come three weeks in a row). We met with her on Thursday and asked her if she remembers any of the lessons she was taught(Elder O'dell has been teaching her for 5 months) and she could only remember the Word of Wisdom. We told her that we would come over every other day at 4pm to visit her and reteach everything so she could be prepared once again for baptism. So thats what we have been doing with here for the past couple days, she says that if she gets baptized her two sons will also get baptized so I pray that all goes well with her.

Since our area is not as successful as it used to be Elder O'dell and Elder Britton tried to find a way that we can have more success. They came up with the idea that we should reactivate all the less actives that fell away from the church. Elder Odell and I went the clerks office and talked with Brother Patrick about getting a Ward List and a less actives list. When we got back to our apartment we cross referenced everything and found that there are more than 60 less actives in our ward and there are 27 in our area. This is great for us because we can fill up our planners and bring these lost souls back to church. Our bishop is by far one of the worst bishops I have ever seen so its hard to deal with him and try to bring these people back because he follows these weird set of rules that he makes up. This week should be slightly more successful then the last and this month should be pretty solid. We have been teaching a man name Baburom and he really wants to get baptized and go teach his village about the gospel so hopefully we can baptize him next week and it could possibly be my first:)

I had the opportunity to go on an exchange with Elder Yelisetti again and I got to meet some awesome people. The first set of people I met was Saul and Johnson. They were brothers and Saul loved basketball so we talked for 45min about it before our lesson. They have this super cute cat I will send a picture of and we played with it also. After we met with them Saul came with us to go teach his Uncle and the rest of his family just down the street. I walked in and they were all really depressed because they were expecting Elder Britton and they thought I was another Indian elder. Elder Britton is from Missouri and he's white and was American so that's why. We sat on the ground and there was about 7 people we were about to teach. I wanted to surprise them with my accent so I did not talk for like 5 min and right when I did they all just lit up! I started joking around with them and showed them pictures of my family and we just laughed and had a super great time. We taught in investigator Sis Swarthi about the first 5 commandments and I tried to make it as fun as possible.

It was so amazing to see how they went from super sad to just all out laughing and having fun. They were my favorite family by far and they were not in my area:( I hope I will see them again. They were so cool I asked If I could get a picture with them.

That's pretty much my week here in India. I hope you all are enjoying your mission as much as I am and I will be praying for your safety:)

Peace

Elder Thajeevs Dusara!