Sowing and Reaping!

This is a picture of typical scence traveling from Freetown to Bo

This has been the fastest two months ever! I feel like I just left last week! Sorry that the time has been going so slow for you, as long as we are working hard the time goes fast. Dang we are already half way through this transfer! I slacked on the letters a few weeks ago so you wont get some for a few weeks, sorry! ...I did send one last week, so you will get that eventually. I have only received the post cards you sent, those come fast. I hope the others have not gotten lost! Anything I say in my written letters that you want to send to people on the blog you are welcome to share. 

Sorry to say ... but I am not home sick at all, I love being here. Not that I don't think of home, I don't think about home until I get to the apartment, usually when I am cooking dinner or breakfast. 

All the pens that you can buy here suck, can you send me some sweet "Boss" pens? And if you have any sweet seminary cards or study things  and some "17 points" cards.

 Its a bummer really, this week we found out that brother Conte (Abdul) is a polygamist. He wasn't progressing at all, so finally Isha Conte (his wife) told us. Its sad, brother Conte doesn't even care for her. He is always at his other wives house... so he will go and give him a big fat Law of Chastity lesson. Isha Conte is so sweet! She has 3 kids and they are so cool. Pray for them!

So pretty much everyone here has a problem with the Law of Chastity. Polygamy is normal here, and fornication isn't out of the normal. I met a 15 year old who was pregnant the other day. Its no big deal here. The girls that get pregnant here are taken in by the fathers family (father of the child) so hopefully they will get married. That is the biggest issue here. The gospel would help everyone here!

I read all of the letters you send in the Dear Elders (DearElder.com), they are so sweet! (We send him copies of all his missionary friends letters through that mail system). Send me everyones! Anyone's you can get your hands on. I love reading about others missions. So in Landon's letter he mentioned a family named the Mthembu family. Their son is in my mission! I will talk to him as soon as I see him, he is in Freetown. My companion is from South Africa and he enjoyed the letter also .. reading about the cities and the things there that he knows. The word that Sister Gold couldn't figure out was "BBQ" so you can let her know.

You can tell Kyle that my PR was 17.13 and my Mt. Sac time was 17.31 (Kyle Hess is a 14 yr. old friend of the family and a cross country runner for THHS and was asking us about Cody's running times so this was his reply to that question). Tell him to just keep running! Tell him to ask Max about his times, he was fast!

I hope Halloween is good, I'll let you know if they do anything here like that. There is a lot of witch craft stuff here, so hopefully I don't get attacked by a demon.... jk! I don't think that will happen, but there is a lot of scary stuff here.

So when I came to Bo, Elder Hales and I were put into an area that was white washed(we were both new to the area), basically we opened a new area, because the sisters before us didn't use their area book so we started fresh. So finally we have seen the work pay off. All the people we taught I have been with since the beginning of their time with missionaries. I have seen their testimonies grow and even some stop progressing. It is sweet to see someone progress all the way to baptism. Yep baptism! On Saturday I baptized Fatmata ("fatu" for short) Kpandayenge. She would have been baptized a few weeks ago, but she traveled to a village, so she was delayed. Its so sweet to see people come in and gain a sweet testimony. Elder Hales is missing out on some sweet people that we started teaching together, even whole families that will be baptized in the next two months. We have 4 whole families that will be baptized by December. One of them we would be baptized if they were married, but they are waiting until December to be married.

After the baptism on Saturday the branch had a party. The branch told us that it was to introduce investigators to the members. Good thing only one investigating family showed up (the ones that need to get married - and they already consider themselves to be members). The activity introduced home teaching and visiting teaching to the branch, this is good, because we have a lot of less actives. They said the activity started at 12:00 noon just after the baptism, but in Salone that meant 2:30. Its funny, in church every one gives "5 min" talks. Five minutes in Salone is 20 min. The people have a weird sense about time. Anyway, the home teaching lesson lasted a literal ten minutes and the rest was 2 hours of dancing and eating. There is a member in our branch who caters, so we ate well. We even got vegetables. So at this party, before you can get your food you must dance in front of the whole branch. If you don't dance, you don't get any food. Luckily they let us elders dance together. The ward parties here are sweet, its just eating and dancing, its pretty much a rave...haha!  They play techno party music, and everyone dances, even the old people! They love it. So that was a flipping sweet day! We had a child of God baptized and a rave in the same day.

Elder Manzini and I get along really well. He teaches me a lot about South Africa and he even teaches me some Africons and some other native language there. He has some sweet gospel music from South Africa even some sweet hymns with an African twist on them. Look for some South African gospel music to listen to.. You will like it!

Last week my companion had pink eye (appolo here) so we had to stay in two days. It stinks staying home! I love going out and teaching.

At the ward party my small hymn book got stolen. I think one of the youth took it so I ordered a regular sized one because it is only 5,000 leones compared to the 130,000 leone to buy the small one. My scriptures came out of their binding .. I think it was because of the humidity so I super glued them back in. The scriptures I bought were really cheap but they will last as long as I am fixing them. Its so humid that I can smear the words in my scriptures.

Well thats all from me. I have a lot of stories to tell actually, I just find it hard to fit all of them in while I am writing. I usually only take an hour to write, but this week I am taking two hours, because Elder Manzini and I love emailing.

 I hope I hear from a lot of people. I like dear elders and written letters because I can sit down and read them and I can write back. I will respond to more so if people want to talk to me that is the best way.

Love Elder Beckett!