Elder Chipman's Adventures in Africa: Week 2 (Week 1) lol

ALRIGHT so first Happy Birthday S/O's to Lane and Aleck! I hope you all have amazing bdays! Also, S/O to the Chipman genes! Kinda like how people thought Brody was a Native or Hispanic on his mission, people here think I am Portuguese until of course I start speaking Portuguese.

Ok y’all my first week of my first transfer is done and I have a ton to tell you but first I will start by answering some questions I have got. 1) We have 6 elders living in our house but we Elder Mejia and Elder Openshaw (our ZL's) are moving out into a new house with another set of missionaries so after today it will just be 4 of us. 2) I am not in a tri anymore. Elder Larsen got transferred up to Beira so it is just me and Elder Macanige. 3) We do walk our area and our area is huge. On Saturday we walked to an investigators home that was 2 and a half hours away from our house so that was way chill. It takes us about 10 min to get to our area and then we just walk for days. I am still trying to get down all the streets and where are families houses are at. 4) I have ridden in some chappas. We take them to and from our Internet Cafe and the grocery store and sometimes into the city for our District and Zone Meetings. I love them. They are the size of the Morris' VW vans and they pile in 20+ people in them hahah.

Elder Macanige and I are working hard down here in Magoanine! We are teaching a lot of cool families right now and have a lot of progressing investigators. This week we have a goal of marking 10 baptism comments which I am so excited and nervous about because I hope they all accept. We are teaching a 13 year old kid named Vincente and he reminds me so much of Burke. At first he is kind of quiet and shy but after talking to him for a little while, he his super smart and funny! I asked what we had talked about in our first lesson and he understood all of it and said how he had felt Christ's love for him while reading and praying and that’s why he wants to be baptized to feel that more. HOW COOL IS THAT?

The language is coming, I am starting to understand others a lot better but when I get asked a question I freeze up and don’t know what they say so hopefully this week I will keep getting better! I have seen as I work hard in my language study I am better able to express myself so I just need to keep working hard. So throughout the day all I basically do is sweat, sweat and sweat so I am super pumped for summer starting up here.

I have loved to hear from everyone this week. I am so happy that Grandma Jo's funeral was good and that the spirit was strong there. I hope everyone has a great week! I will keep you all posted on our families we are teaching! Quick spiritual note for the week comes from Elder Holland in a talk we watched in the MTC. He says, "Once we start to put the Lord's will over ours, then will he be able to strengthen us the most." And I can promise you this because I have felt both sides of this in my first week. This will be something I need to work on for my entire mission and the rest of my life. Until next week.

Love,

Elder Chipman