March 30, 2013

Hello Everyone,

I am super sorry that this is going to be a short email, sometimes
things just don't work out the way you want them to. On the other
hand, yesterday was my 1 year anivesary of arriving in Africa. The
time just flies by doesn't it?

YES the mission office is airconditioned. That was honestly one of the
only things that kept me going on during the rough start I had here.
Things are going a lot better now here though.

Elder Burkhart
I did not get the drivers licence yet, but we will be making another
Post office run on Monday. You can talk to the AAA people about what
happens if you re-renew it and then the other one shows up. Or if you
can think of some way to guarantee that that one will show up fast.
You can email Elder or Sister Semken to get through to me before next
saturday, I already talked to them about it. If it turns out just
redoing it is the best idea, I will probably send you the pictures on
Wednesday or Thursday, I already asked for approval on that.

To my knowledge, we are not doing anything for easter. Maybe we will
be doing a musical number in sacrement meeting, that's what we did
last year.

Yes I try to write in my journal a lot still. I'm not as good as I
used to be (every day for the first 7-8 months booyah), but I probably
have at least 10-11 months of entries.

My white shirts aren't really thinning, at least as far as I know.
They are a little less white, I will admit that. I'm going to dry
clean some of them this week to see if that will help. If it does
reach the point where I need new shirts, I'll just have some made
here. Everything else seems to be holding out pretty well, I can't
really think of any "needs' that I have.

The power has gotten a lot more stable here the last week, thankfully.
So yes, rice cooker is back in action. We don't cook too much american
stuff, except when I have the alfredo sauce mixes. I guess that's
Italian though.

Yes I have been getting the forwarded emails from Jacob, thank you
very much! That has been really fun to read them.

Let me share you an interesting story from the life of an office
missionary. So 2 weeks ago the country of Benin finally figured out
that we are actually a church (no joke, missionaries even heard it on
the radio). I don't know why it took so long, especially since we have
been legally recognised since like 2006. At any rate, they figured out
they shouldn't really charge us so much on our visas and residence
cards and such (we were paying something like 20% more than nuns or
something). So we decided to run a giant batch of missionaries through
for their residence cards. This is the one that requires the blood
test. So we called them all in on Friday and ran the blood test. There
were 19 missionaries that were in this group, and some of them had to
bring their companions. Acccording to my count, we had 2 doctors, a
government agent, 27 missionaries (4 of which were sisters), 2 senior
couple missionaries, and 2 brethren from Ghana (running an unrelated
audit with one of the aforementioned senior couple) all in the office
at the same time. It was chaos. Especially when they all of a sudden
asked us to have them all fill out extra forms we weren't
anticipating. I was on my feet from about 7:45 AM to probably 11:30AM,
trying to run through the crowd and get 20 different things done at
the same time. But the good news is that everyone survived, and I
never once broke down to cry like a baby. we decided we are going to
split them up into two groups to take them to immigration for the next
step this week. Hopefully that will go better.

Office Missionaries
How are the pageant preparations going? Are you cast team leaders again?

I love you all very much,

Elder Christensen