September 15, 2009

The way we cook rice is to just throw it in a rice cooker. Push the button down and wait. They cook it still in a pot over a fire that they built. There's no special way to make rice here. It just tastes way better than American rice. That's for sure. We can see all the rice fields when we get to more of the outskirts of the city.

Today we're going to wat phnom. I don't know how to spell that in English. Its one of their temples built into a mountain. Elder Sweeten says there are monkeys and other animals there and stuff too.

This week has been really slow. This holiday that is going on right now lasts about a month. And we're not even at the worst part of it now. All of our investigators have gone back to there hometowns. So we have no one to meet with. And when it rains, the city completely dies and there is no one on the streets. So we can't go finding either. And the members said that next week it'll be even worse. So I don't know what we're going to do in terms of teaching people. Plus we've both been really sick this past week or so. Right now I feel like I'm about to die. But its p-day and if I want to eat I have to go out and do stuff today. So I'm out riding around anyway. The sun actually came out twice this week. That was nice. But it usually gets covered up really fast again.

We had two of our investigators get baptized this weekend. That was exciting. I still haven't gotten to baptized anyone. But it’s ok. I'll get my chance sooner or later. Probably sooner because the branch has taken off. We've worked so hard trying to stabilize this branch and its really cool because we're starting to see the fruits of our labor. After the baptism they served food. After we were finished eating we asked one of the members what we just ate. They said it was pig nose and pig ear. It actually wasn't too bad. It was better than tomatoes. That's for sure.

Yesterday we had a 7 foot green viper slither across the road in front of us yesterday. It scared the living heeby jeebies out of us. It was ginormous. So we told the neighbors, and they freaked out because snakes aren't something that you mess around with here. So there was like a search party of like 20 people trying to find it when we left to go to our appointment. I don't know if they found it. But man, it scared us so bad.

Elder Sweeten has made me participate in small talk a lot more. We usually talk about food and family. I'm learning how to make food by asking people. To the kids we ask if they go to school or not because sometimes they’re too poor to go to school. And we've been praying really hard to find investigators who are going to be branch presidents and elder's quorum presidents and stuff like that and be good strong members 20 to 30 years from now. Everyone is willing to meet with us because we're white and we speak Khmae to them and try to help them. But we're trying to sift through everyone to see who is ready and who isn't. But ya, things are slow because of the holiday. But we still manage.