March 16

Hey everybody!! I was happy to hear from so many of you this week! The
past 7 days have been super busy for me and elder orton but also super
good! We had a lot of success finding new people this week, and the
greatest part about it was that a lot of them found us! We had two
people just come up and start talking to us about the gospel and what
we share and they've both turned into new investigators! We're still
working with a lot of our other ones too, in fact I have a funny story
about one of them. Her name is 'T'(Don't even try to pronounce
that, i've had 3 weeks of practice and it's still wrong). And during
our last lesson with her we brought a member, and she didn't have
enough chairs for all of us to sit outside! In suriname it's very rude
to sit on the ground and if they don't have enough chairs we're mostly
just stuck standing. And that's exactly what this 80 year old
investigator tried to do! She tried to give ME the chair and stand! I
told her "U bent tachtig!!!" Or "You're eighty!!!" hahah and she
finally gave in and let me stand while she took the chair. We also had
a lot of success with less actives this week, we visited 13 of them!
And we saw a couple people in church this week who hadn't been there
in a long time I was really happy to see that. We also had the
opportunity to give one of the members a blessing, she was shaking
during our lesson and very weak, that next sunday she was great and
super excited to see us! She looked much better and it was a strong
testimony builder to me of the priesthood that we have and how it
really does set us apart. In other news our favorite member in our
branch sister marlene left this morning to America for a month :(
She's just visiting family for awhile but we were sad to see her go!
She's awesome and a great member of our branch, we had an awesome
lesson with a less active and we brought her along to talk about
temples, we knew she would be helpful but when the less active
expressed financial concerns about going to the temple sister marlene
told him she would pay for his ticket!! Hahah she really is an angel
and she does a ton to help us and our branch out. Another funny story
is about a group of kids we have in our area, they're mostly
teenagers, probably 15 and 16 for the most part, and they totally want
to rob us, they're just a little lacking in the self confidence
department. They like to ask us to give them our money, but when we
say no they don't really do anything they just kind of walk away
hahah, I like to just joke around with them at this point, if I ever
see them in their neighborhood hangout spot I like to shout "Goed
bezig dames" which means "keep up the good work ladies" hahah it's
pretty funny and they all start saying "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" hahah it's
great. Anyways I think that's about all this week, we only had 1
investigator in church everyone else bailed :( but it looks like this
week is promising and hopefully our hard work will pay off with our
investigators and we can retain the less actives we've just brought
back! I love and miss you guys I hope you have a great week!
Elder Carpenter

 Last week's p-day game of risk