The Big Deal

Brandon's weekly email came with still more pictures, and here is a sampling, along with his letter he writes. The first photo is with his companion, in front of their house. The second shot is the church, which shares the building with a hardware store and a cable store. (Check out the satellite dishes on the roof!) He took a couple shots of his arms and legs, to show how the bugs love him. He must have sweet blood, because he used to get a ton of bites on every camping trip. The final photo is Sunday night's dinner: a whole fish - head, tail, & bones.

Alrighty, so i made a list of everything i want to email you about-

First off, learning patioas is very interesting, whagwon and mdayo are the most common phrases you hear. Its kinda easy, but when you get a quiet talker or someone who talks too fast, whoa! My mind just gets jumbled sometimes.

Then there's dogs and goats everywhere. They run the streets! And the dogs aren't even dogs, they're all mongrels. They look disgusting. They're skin and bones, at least the goats have meat on them.

Gas prices down here are less then a dollar American, i dunno what gas is at back home, but it's really low down here.

We have the JW headquarters here in Old Harbour. There is a massive compound just down the road from where we live, they have entrances on 3 blocks (so far as i know) and eveyone almost immediately thinks we're jw's.

They have 5 main games they play down here: dominoes, bingo, cricket, soccer and ludy. Ludy (loo-dee) is a local game that is apparently like sorry!, they love cricket and soccer though, totally obsessed. And dominoes, you can always tell when someone is playing dominoes because they slam the dominoes on the boards. And bingo is how they gamble, its a weird form of gambling, but that's how they gamble, not cards or slots, bingo.

Mangos is next -- there are so many varieties of mangos, the stringy ones suck though, because they get caught in your teeth, but I haven't even tasted half of the mangos here.

Handwashing clothes isn't as bad as I thought, in fact, I got some stains out handwashing when the washing machines at the MTC wouldn't. And there's the magic blue bar we use, I'm totally bringing some back with me!

The people down here are very illiterate. They struggle reading, so we have to explain a lot and ask a lot of questions when we teach. We used to have 2 progressing investigators, but we had to drop one because she wouldn't come to church and the other struggled to kick his girlfriend out and she is really anti-white. Thankfully though, we picked up 4 or 5 new ones that look promising.

Then there's the ghettos, this is where most of the people live, they rob electricty and tv channels and water in these places, they live in really small houses, like 2-4 rooms big.

Then I'm getting eaten alive, its kinda gone down when I started sleeping with a fan pointed at me. My shoes look like crap, the one pair has some fake leather and it peeled so I sharpied over the grey foamy stuff and the bottoms are just falling off, there's foam in the shoes soles for cushion, but it doesn't work, I'm trying to save my other pair for as long as possible.

The food here is interesting, I love bag juices which is just water and flavored syrup frozen, but bread fruit sucks, a lot of foods are really bland.

There is garbage everywhere along the road, there are very few places where there isn't garbage and there's always smoke, whether from ganja or the garbage being burned - yuck.

Then there's bars on all the nice houses, over the windows and doors, we have bars at our place too. When we go tracting, we go gatecalling, everyone here has gates, so you call at the gates and hopefully they'll let you come up and talk with them.

Then they're racist down here too, not bad racist, but that's how they tell each other apart, we're whities because of our skin color. Then they determine the difference between each other by brown or black, depending on the darkness of your skin.

They have 3 forms of public transportation, taxis, which they cram four people in the back seat and one in the front; cruisers, which are like really big vans; and chi-chis which are like the greyhound buses back home. The semis here are weird, they load as much as they can, they pile it up in the center far above the walls of the trailers and they have strobe lights on top of the cabs, what for, we can't figure out.

Then we have this crazy lady that visits us a lot in the mornings, she brings us food and everything. we're still working on figuring her out.

Then the Obama issue is interesting. Everyone thinks we're from America and they shout we love obama, we have to tell them we're not from America when this is brought up, or we weren't there to see him elected.

I drink a lot of powdered drinks. Powdered whole milk and kool-aid. It gets boring having straight water after a while.

Well, this is all I have time to write about right now. I'll send more info about the area and what's going on next Monday.

love ya all,
Elder Huffaker