10/21/13

This week was pretty neat!  Fall is coming so it's been cooling down a lot, it was 85 degrees yesterday!  Fall doesn't even exist in Florida, neither does winter or spring, it's always summer.  We got 4 new investigators this week!! That's 4 more than the whole previous month!!  So things are finally starting to pick up!  We just hope that they will stay solid and be baptized and go into the Temple in the future.  So not a lot happened this week, except that Elder Oaks came!  He is very funny when he isnt in the Conference Center.  His whole talk talked about how we shouldnt wait to get married once we are home from our missions.  Here are a few of his quotes, "the missionaries come home from there mission, and doggonit they don't get married!  They "hang out!", Now if hanging out isnt a sin, its darn near close to being one!"  It was pretty funny.  He talked alot about what to do once we are home from our missions, so it won't really apply to me for 2 years.  But it was still a really good talk.  He also talked a lot about the Temple and how we will see the growth in this area once it is completed this Spring.  He challenged us to teach more about the Temple, since the Temple is the end goal, not just baptism.  "Baptism is just a step to get closer to salvation, the Temple is where we receive salvation" -Paraphrased from Elder Oaks

I also went on an exchange with one of the zone leaders, Elder Samuelian from Alpine Utah.  He knew Alyssa and I knew his sister who is serving in Tallahassee right now.  It was awesome!  he is a Spanish Elder so I got to use a lot of my Spanish.  Oh wait, I don't know any Spanish, so I didn't say a whole lot when we came to the Spanish homes.  But we came across a couple of Haitian homes and next thing I knew I was having conversations in Creole!  That was a blessing because that hasn't happened since, I'm still at the very basic level.  The gift of tongues is real!  Later we went to a Spanish ward correlation, apparently the gift of tongues only works in Creole for me:)  They also had mutual that night and all the youth were saying "Gigante!" which i think means giant.  So I was pretty popular that night, some kid thought I played for Miami Heat, then his friend was like, "There aren't any white guys on the Heat!"  Spanish kids are funny.

Also this week I've been able to use my knowledge of basketball in many ways.  I somehow taught a whole lesson and related it to basketball.  It worked, we were teaching these 2 teenagers who play bball.  I don't know exactly how it all worked but they understood the gospel and are more interested now!  They were just surprised that a white boy knew how to play basketball, that's when i told them to google Lone Peak Basketball, that'll show them a lot of white boys that know how to play ball.

Also ive been teaching kids how to play basketball, that's a great teaching opportunity.  We stop, if we have time, if we see kids playing street ball.  Then we show them how to properly shoot and how to dribble, since a lot of the time they are younger and don't know the fundamentals, then we teach them a little lesson! It's awesome!

Oh man, I had my first Haitian meal this last week.  I couldn't believe what we were fed, the thought ran threw my head that this couldn't happen in America.  But it does!  Like i said in a previous letter, Haitians live as if they are still in Haiti, that also means they still eat like they are in Haiti.  I don't know what we ate, it was tasty, I just know that there was a lot of different parts of different animals in this stew stuff that you put over Haitian rice.  And Haitians use every part of the animal, so all the bones were in it, all the fat, some hair (either it was animal hair or human hair, i don't know) It was interesting.  I think I heard the hostess say that she put in chicken, duck, goat, cow, and some other animal I didn't recognize.  And Haitians get really offended if there is anything left besides the bones.  So we had to suck the bone marrow out and eat all the fat, eww, i wont go into anymore detail.  But in the end it was still a pretty good meal:)

Also this week i've seen a lot of what prophets have foretold, that is the crumbling of the family unit.  Parents are very abusive here and most parents aren't even married.  The woes of serving in the ghetto.  It just breaks my heart to see this everyday, in Utah and growing up I hardly ever saw this.  But now I see it everyday.  So instead of moping about it and doing nothing, i've been studying the "Family: A Proclamation to the World", it has a ton of good stuff in it that I can share in lessons.  Also the Gospel of Jesus Christ is what blesses families. So ive been emphasizing that in the lessons to try to make them wake up and see how important family is.

well my time is up so I gotta go!

Much love from the ghetto:)

Elder Spencer Bailey

A family in Spencer's home ward has a missionary in the same mission (Elder Harral, left). His dentist (second on right) visited Florida last week and was able to hand-deliver these packages!