22 Feb 2010

Hello!
Hey everyone, well this was an interesting week. we had a lot of meeting and stuff that took up a lot of our proselyting time :( Like Zone Leader Council which takes up a whole morning and afternoon, Stake Correlation meeting which takes up half of our night and is usually completely worthless.. a few baptismal interviews and a lot of other stuff plus our regular meetings. but the good news is we were still able to hit most of our goals that we set for the week. We had 6 people at church yesterday, it was a pretty stressful Sunday. but the whole Frazier family came. They are progressing really well and will be baptized soon. i got permission from president nelson to baptize them next week even though they have not been to church 3 times... but we will see if we can make it happen. the mom and 2 of the kids will definitely be ready by next Sunday, but the only thing that is making me lean towards waiting a little longer is their oldest son whom is 19. he is really awesome he is just never there when we are teaching them cause he is usually at work. so i cant decide if we should wait till he is ready as well and baptize them all together or just baptize the mom and 2 of the kids now and the other son later. i just fear that if he doesn't get baptized with the rest of the family that he might get discouraged. so if anyone has any suggestions please let me know. I hope that i will be staying here in jamaica, but i really have no idea yet. but just in case dont send anything to this address here. this is week 6 of this transfer. We are also really excited for the Jones family, I dont remember if i told you this story but Mrs. Jones is the one that had a dream the night before we came over and someone in her dream told her that 2 young men were going to come to her house and teach her, and that she should receive and accept them. so that is really cool. well total it is a family of 8 people. but 3 of them dont live at home anymore. they are grown and have their own families now. But yesterday the mom and one of the daughters came to church. We are hoping to get the whole family there next week. I guess the marriage is kind of on the rocks right now, and Yolanda is really looking for something to bring her family back together. I got kind of discouraged yesterday at church, I called all of the quorum and auxillary leaders to inform them of all the people that we were expecting to have at church, well i got a hold of a few of them but alot never called me back. Total in the ward we had over 15 investigators at church, and everything was just terribly unorganized! it was seriously a mad house. I dont even know what happened. for some reason they didnt have a young mens sunday school class at all yesterday, so Troy jr. had to go to gospel principles with his mom and dad, The nursery was no where to be found and Aquila there 2 year old daughter was kind of on a rampage, and i really wanted troy and nakisa to be able to go to class. so i went and tracked down the nursery lady and dragged her out of class, i gave her aquila and she just took her into the room and wasnt even playing with her or anything, but i figured that she had it. so i left and went into primary to check on the kids that we had in there and primary was just crazy, they have like 30 kids piled into one long narrow room and the teachers are just yelling at all the kids to try and get them to be quiet. when they teach they dont use any pictures or anything so you know the kids are not paying any attention or learning anything. One of the ladies who helps in the primary who was kinda frustrated leaned over to me and said man these kids just dont listen, i dont know what there problem is. Ah i just wanted to yell at her, ha of course they dont listen this is the most boring primary i have ever seen. there is no organization or anything. but i didnt cause that would be really mean. I than made my way over to Gospel Principles to see our investigators there, everything was good in that class except the fact that the lady teaching has a seriously thick accent and im not sure if many people were understanding everything that she was saying. So than i was going back over to primary and one of the councelors in the bishopric stopped me and said "hey that lady doing the nursery just let that little girl walk out and into primary, she didnt even follow her. and now she is just sitting in there by herself. You should go tell her that she cant do that, she needs to watch the children" I said that it is not my responsibility or right to tell a grown woman how to do her calling, I said that is your responsibility and duty. he just gave me a funny look. . . So yeah it was just a bad sunday. this ward needs some real leadership and organization! but i have learned that we cant try and take over a ward as missionaires, it will never work because we leave. and we are just the Elders. but its really frustrating sometimes when you know that you could do a better job running the whole ward by yourself. But i know that the best thing that i can do to help the ward is to magnify my office and my responsibilities to the best of my ability. So that is what i am doing. But i just fear that this ward doesnt have the leadership or organization to retain these people that we are bringing into the church. between the years 2007 and 2009 there were 26 baptisms in jamaica 1st ward, there are only a handfull of those people who are still active, the 2 years before that they baptized almost double that, close to 50 people. and there are only 3 or 4 of those who are still active. They just gotta get it together and start doing the things that make a ward run the way that it is supposed to. the first would be to study and follow the church handbook of instructions! well this week should be a great week! despite all of my complaints about this ward i do love it here, and i know that they are all trying to be better. I just think alot of times they dont know how to be better. Shantel is getting her Patriarchal Blessing next sunday, she is doing really well, she is moving to Japan for a year to teach english. she will be leaving in may. We are talking about me going to japan to visit her when i get home and when she recieves her Endownment. cause she will be at her 1 year mark there in japan. well i love you all! keep being awesome!
Hurrah For Israel!!!
Elder Olsen