Elder Mackinnon Lyman: Pests

Bonjour from Côte d’Iviore! This week was good. It's been kinda crazy, I haven't had much time to pretype anything super interesting, but here's what I have.

So, last week I mentioned the rat family. They live above our kitchen, and often you can hear them scurrying around. We’ve been trying to solve the problem by keeping our food more safe and protected, and I think it’s helped. Unfortunately, now they eat the geckos that live here instead. I’ve walked down the stairs some mornings and just seen a dead gecko with only his tail eaten a few times. It must be the rat family. We are currently searching for a better solution with them. Also, I don’t know when they came, but we now have cockroaches as well. We had seen one or two small ones throughout the week, usually the size of a jolly rancher. Then, on samedi, Elder Palmer was looking for his bouncy ball. We searched everywhere, and couldn’t find it. We then thought, “Hm, maybe it went down the drain.” So we lifted up the cement cover to the plumbing system for our house, I don’t know how to explain it to you guys very well. Anyways, we lifted it up, and probably 4 or 5 cockroaches, bigger than the size of my thumb, came scurrying out from the grate. And yes, of course, all in OUR direction. There was a lot of jumping, running, and yelling, but we killed them with wooden poles. There were a couple more of the big ones in the sewage hole, and we washed them away. Nope, we did not find the ball either.

So yeah, that was great. Here’s another wonderful story: On dimanche, Elder Palmer and I were hungry. Earlier in the week, we had the idea to make funnel cake. So we tried to make it. Even though we have the most ghetto kitchen supplies and a homemade recipe, we did it. Kind of. Not really. Yeah, it didn’t work. We made pancake batter, put it in a ziploc bag, and cut a hole in the end. We put oil in a pan and heated it up. Trial run 1: we poured some batter in the pan, and it worked well. It wasn’t quite funnel cake, but it was close enough. Trial run 1: success. Trial run 2: I was pouring some of the batter into the pan, like before, when suddenly the ziploc part of the bag opened and all of the batter dumped into the pan. Trial run 2: fail. We continued cooking the batter in the pan, just because we couldn’t let all the batter go to waste, and it became a MASSIVE pancake: almost an inch thick and the size of the pan. Not a funnel cake. A cake the size of the pan. A pancake in the most literal sense you can imagine. It didn’t even fit on the plate we put it on, so we had to chop it up. It was still good, but not a funnel cake.

That’s it for stories this week. Now to business matters. Last week, I briefly touched on the fact that I changed companions and that I’m now chef du district. So, normally, a missionary who has just finished with training, stays junior companion to other missionaries for a while, and then eventually is considered to be senior comp or a chef or something like that. So, I finished training just a month ago. I’m senior comp and chef du district. It’s wild. Now I have to take charge of our companionship, set rendezvous, and other stuff like that. Not too bad. As chef du district, I have to plan a district council each week, send indicateurs clefs (I don’t know what it’s called in English) to the chef du zone weekly, do baptismal interviews for investigators who are ready for baptism, correct any problems in my district, among other things. So yeah, life is pretty crazy. I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but the mission is hard. Or at least, it’s not easy. Mais, ça va aller, c’est bon maintenant.

We had planned on inviting the famille Djehi to get baptized this week, but things didn’t work out. Fr Djehi’s older brother was really sick, so he had to go to the hospital. I don’t know any other details on that. Sr Adeline and Sr Marie came to church! Sr Adeline is amazing, she fed us attieke and sauce graene at sector on samedi. Sr Marie is awesome too. She always has inspired questions for us. Unfortunately, she will be moving away soonish, like Fr Ette. It’s going good with our ami’s. This week Fr Peter (a member in Vridi canal that we’re friends with) leaves on his mission to Nigeria, and we have zone conference. I think that’s about it for this week.

Here’s my scripture for the week:

“And it came to pass that the servants did go and labor with their mights; and the Lord of the vineyard labored also with them; and they did obey the commandments of the Lord of the vineyard in all things.” (Jacob 5:72)

So, this scripture comes from the huge parable in the book of Jacob, where Jacob quotes Zenos and compares the world to a vineyard. It talks about the efforts that the Lord of the vineyard (Jesus Christ)did to try and save the branches of the tree (Israel) and his servants that helped him too in his efforts to ‘preserve the natural fruit.’ His servants in this story, are us. We need to do our best to obey the commandments of the Lord in all things. We need to be diligent to work in His vineyard with our might. If we do this, He will be with us. working with us, comforting us, and carrying us when we fall. I know personally that heaven is a lot closer than we think, and through obedience to our Lord, and especially through prayer and scripture study, we will realize that He isn't as far as we think, and that He will always be there to help us, no matter what our needs may be. I love you guys, have a good week.

Elder Lyman