August 17, 2009

Ca va (Su vah)!?

"Ca va" is what we say to all the Mauritian people we meet. It means 'how are you' in French. Sometimes they get the wrong impression and go off speaking loads of French we don’t understand though.

This week has been full of miracles. Things are really going well. We finally taught the nieces I mentioned last week. Their names are actually Darian (12) and Taylor (10). They are really cool and are excited to get baptized. Their mother is less active and the father isn't a member, but we hope it will be good for the whole family. Their baptismal date is for August 29th. There is also a part member, less active family we found from Mauritius. Two of them, Kevin and Nando, now have a baptismal date for Sept. 12th. They are going to need a lot of encouragement to get there, but we are counting on the Lord to get them there.

We had two exchanges again this week, this time with Elders. I stayed in Crawley with an English Elder named Elder Tomlinson for the first one. He actually came out with me, so it was pretty cool to work with him. The other exchange I had was with an Elder from Bountiful who came out a moves after me. He was trained in the same district as me in London. Both exchanges were pretty good and the second was pretty exciting.... he didn’t know how to drive manual. We didn’t realize that before we started the exchange. Since I'm not allowed to drive, there was nothing I could do except pray and hope we made it through the day. We did, but it felt strange to me to have smooth shifting when Elder Gasparato came back to the area. I know the Lord was looking over us.

Crawley doesn’t have a whole lot of things to do for P-Day, but today most of the zone is coming here. We are going to play some English Football and have a good time, so I’m excited. Hope all is well. Have a great week!

Love,
Elder Kade Karges

August 10, 2009

Hello!

My stress levels have finally gone back down after this week. It was an amazing experience to see the family get baptized and a great way to celebrate my hump day weekend! I’ll try to send a picture with the names of everyone involved with the baptisms. It was a great blessing to be a part of. Even now it doesn’t seem possible, and I know it wouldn’t have been without the Lord. The cake and other food helped to celebrate as well. (We had a grocery store deliver him a “Congratulations” cake and some other favorite foods to celebrate his hump day.) Thank you so much!!! Elder Gasparato says thank you as well :) To top it all off I passed my driving theory test on the 6th! Now I just have to schedule and take my practical. Until I pass that, I cant drive anymore :/

We have been finding and teaching other people all along the way, but most of them haven't stuck around for long. Now that we don't have the family as investigators, we really need to focus on finding new ones. We have some that we are excited about though. There are two nieces of a reactivated member that we have been trying to teach, but are struggling to make appointments with. Their names are Leigh and Taylor. They could be baptized this month if we see them soon. We are also teaching a cousin of one of the YSA that we bring on a lot of teaches. Her name is Emma and she doesn’t want to feel rushed, but she could be ready if she wanted.

We had two exchanges this week, both with sister missionaries. That was a first for me... I thought it might be a little weird, but it actually turned out really good. On a sister exchange we don’t go to their flat, but we can meet at the church and study with them and/or do some finding. With the sisters in Worthing we found on the highstreet for a couple hours and with the Epsom sisters, we did both. All four of the sisters in our zone are good, hard working missionaries, so we are grateful to have them here. We have several exchanges coming up with the rest of the zone.

I love you and hope things continue going well back home. I appreciate all your letters and support and if I haven’t written anyone back, let me know!! It is easy to forget who I have and haven't written. Have an amazing week!

Love,
Elder Kade Karges

Me with all of the food my amazing family sent me for my hump day! Thank you!

All of the Zone Leaders of my mission at Zone Leader Council with President and Sister Shamo

Dave Sinclair, Jason Orr, Dieuma Soopramanier, Katijah Naiker, and others!

Monday, August 3,2009

Hello,

This week has been really full and kind of hectic. Everything turned out good in the end though. It’s always good to hear that back home things are going well.

To start the week we had a meeting called ZLC (Zone Leader Council). All the zone leaders met at Presidents house for basically the whole day Tuesday and talked about things that need to happen, goals, and plans for the next 6 weeks. It was really cool. Last moves they had a different meeting in place of it, so this was my first one. On Friday we had Zone Conference (ZC) where members of three different zones all came to the Crawley chapel to meet with President and Sister Shamo. Immediately afterwards we had an appointment with the family we are teaching.

This is where things got hectic. President needed to come with us to help interview two members of the family, but he needed to interview some Elders right after ZC. One of our district leaders, Elder Church, was supposed to do the rest of the interviews, but we were going to go on splits with President and him so we could be more effective. Elder Church and I finally left to their house over thirty minutes late, but when we got there, they weren’t even in. President came with Elder Gasparato twenty minutes later and the family arrived home around the same time. Eventually things worked out, but it was stressful. Sunday wasn’t much better because the ride for the family to come to church didn’t work out as planned, but the good news is that it did work out and they are still on track to be baptized on Saturday!! Until then I think I’ll still stress out about it a little. It has been such a blessing to teach this family. So many miracles have happened to make it possible for them to be baptized.

I’m sorry if that story sounds kind of confusing. I am out of time for emailing so I was trying to hurry. I hope you all have a great week!

Love,
Elder Kade Karges