Hey family.
hows it all going. honestly
if no one had told me yesterday was easter i wouldn't have known. people
celebrate here, but seeing as they don't have that much it's not really an
easter dinner. we had a huge activity with all the members and missionaries
in togo this morning where we went to a stadium and had a soccer tournament.
it was pretty intense, africans love their soccer. i don't think i
even ate dinner last night.... i don't think i was hungry, just drank a lot of
water like usual. but we ate some stuff at a members house right before church
that was really good and someone gave us some youki that night. youki is
like a soda fruit drink and its pretty good. family sounds good back there
though, have fun at the family party tonight. tell everyone that i said
hello.
trinas hair is so short! it's
crazy, but looks great. almost all the women here cut their hair really
short because its so curly and then they braid wigs into their hair and do lots
of other crazy stuff. they have haircut
places and hairdressers everywhere. its crazy.
we have some sisters [missionaries]
now. the first one came just a few weeks before us. they are all african and all are in benin.
i'm not sure if there are anymore coming but they will all be african. elder mccray got replaced by elder rantoniano,
something like that. he is from madagascar. all the elders from
madagascar are short but have super long names. some close to ten syllables,
and they look like mexicans too.... he is awesome.
we use translators, not alot because
mostly everyone speaks french. but i feel
like this last week has had unusually a lot of people who only speak eve. but teaching like that is super hard, but we
do our best. my eve is still tiny but the people love it when i try to
speak. they love it when they ask me if i understand french and i say
"a little" in eve. they laugh so much. one lady,
gloria, who we have taught once so far told me that if i ate a lot of pat then
i could learn it all, because i told her that im still learning french and
trying to learn eve. she is from nigeria and speaks english, french, eve,
and some other dialects from nigeria. some people here know a
disgustingly large amount of languages. we taught her in french though,
but she told me that if i needed to say something in english that i could.
haha.
just one picture for this week.
that was on the drive back from the stadium this morning. its so
green here. so many trees. minus the dirt roads and nasty shack
cours everything is treey and nice. it rained a bit last night. we were
talking to a less active member and we ran into her house thing to get a little
out of the rain. it didn't last long, but made the air a little cleaner
so that was really nice. some of the sewers were worse though, so kinda
bitter sweet. it stinks here, if i haven't said that before. all the
sewers are open pretty much on the side of the road and people pee where ever,
whenever and throw trash everyone....just stinky, hard to describe the smell
sometimes but you get a little used to it. rainy season is fast
approaching though and im kinda excited, it will definitely be an experiece.
haha.
i cut my hair too and lost
20 pounds... didn't think my hair was that thick. Guillome's mom,
patience, said that before long i would start looking like elder gomun, who is
super skinny. my diet increased hugely with water and decreased to pretty
much nothing in sugar though. im great though. i think that that is
all for now, and this week. pretty crazy. already been a month is africa.
weird. i love you all. good luck on break enjoy the food for me.
love Elder Rybin