New bike and Futsal

This week was good. My new bike is way better than my old one! I just hope no one steals it now haha. We taught lessons to our less-active members and we are starting to have some show up to church again so that is awesome. Unfortunately, we had to drop one of our investigators named Tito. He was an old guy who has been an Investigator for like 5 years. He always just gets new baptismal dates, but never goes to church and keeps smoking. He wants our church to pay for all his medical bills like the church he is "going" to now does, he wants to know what our church can give him. Yeah how about your eternal salvation? But he just doesn't understand when we tell him and he never reads the Kitab Mormon so for now we will focus our efforts on others. Too bad. Another one of our investigators, Rhismond, said he was going to come to Church for sure this week. And he didn't... so that was sad. Hopefully we can get him too and he will be baptized and stay active and everyone is happy!

We were proselyting this week and found 2 more potential investigators. We gave them the first lesson and I don't know if they were very interested or not but we'll come back and find out.

A sport they love to play here is Futsal. It is like soccer except the balls and the courts are smaller. It is pretty fun but I'm no good at it. I'll probably get better because that's like all we play here.

I still haven't found out who my new trainer is going to be, I should find out soon though. It's good to know that everything is going well at home!

Here some pictures of food here.

This is chicken head plus some various guts on a stick

Some nice and healthy fired Ice cream

Some chicken foot soup, Yum!

- Elder Hymas

This week has been pretty good. Nothing too exciting really happened. We had PLD on Tuesday and Wednesday. It is like a meeting with our zone and the mission president and his APs. We had Interviews with him on Tuesday. Mine went fine, I guess I am getting a new trainers though halfway through my training. Elder Mangum has been in Solo for 6 weeks (months?) already and is getting a transfer so I should be getting another trainer in 2 weeks. On Wednesday we had a meeting most of the day with the president. It was good, pretty long. I broke my piece of junk bike for good on Wednesday haha. The frame just straight up snapped so we have been without bikes for a few days and just walk, it is so slow. We are going to buy a new bike today I think. My companion and I are getting along great, it's kind of a bummer he is leaving so soon but whatevs. I might have gotten sick from the food, I'm not really sure what it was, but it wasn't fun.

Yeah the groom at the wedding was dressed pretty weird. The bucket hat isn't a fashion thing here haha, it was the first time my companion or I have seen it. It must be for royal people or something.

Elder Hymas showing you his good side.

Love ya

-Elder Hymas

Things are going alright here, most of our investigators are pretty interesting. I don't think they are really progressing though. They say they will go to church and they want to but then they never come. pretty frustrating. We need some new investigators but it is hard because we can't knock on doors and everyone here is Bob (our code name for Muslim).

On Tuesday we tried proselyting and we scared some people and got some gates closed and locked on us, that was pretty fun. On Wednesday we wen't to a wheelchair charity thing that the church donated a bunch of wheelchairs to. It was pretty cool, there was a white guy from Canada there so that was fun. (you don't see many white people here). On Thursday we went to a meeting with the stake president and the mayor's office staff of Solo and they talked about why there are white people in the city and what are they doing here. I didn't understand much of what was going on but there was free food so I was all for it. On Friday we taught lessons and English class and stuff. My companion got really sick so we went home early. We watched General Conference on Saturday. It was all in Indonesian so it was hard to Understand. We also went to a royal wedding Saturday night. It was super interesting. They dressed really weird and sang really weird songs and danced really weird dances haha. It was cool though. I didn't get any sleep at all last night. I got really really sick and hurt all over. I had a fever and thew up and yeah.. So we spent all yesterday resting and trying to deal with my sickness. It wasn't very much fun at all. After 24 hours I started to feel better, Hopefully I keep feeling good, I fell kinda eh right now. Pretty annoying.

Us at the wedding

The Bride

The groom with his cool bucket hat

Week 2 in Indonesia

I flew out to my first zone last Wednesday. I am in Solo, in the Jebres ward. It is a little bit cooler here I think, still really hot! My companion is Elder Mangum, he is a really nice guy and a great missionary. We are in the same house with Elder King and Elder Hayes. They are all really cool elders. I'm going to have a good time here I bet.

It is still pretty hard right now understanding what people are saying in Indonesia, especially the natives, but I'm trying. We ride our bikes everywhere, so that, plus the heat, makes life a bit difficult. I should used to it. My bike is a piece of junk too. It has broken twice so far and we had to get it repaired each time. It only costs about a dollar to fix it so whatever.

This Weekend was sacrifice days for the Muslims. They pretty much sacrifice tons of cows and goats in the public. The missionaries are friends with a Muslim named Jon, they invited us to watch them sacrifice a cow and a few goats. It was pretty gnarly. I got it on video and took lots of pictures. We ate some of the sacrificed goats and cows at Pak Jons house yesterday. I ate the intestines and guts and whatever else was there. It was pretty good.

I killed my first rat last night. I saw it run past me when we got in the house and we hunted it down for a bit. We were all armed with brooms and mops, I had the trap. Once we found it I got it in the trap, but while we were busy being victorious he escaped the trap and we lost him again. So the hunt continued! we found him in my and elder Mangum's office. Elder Mangum smashed it with a pan a few times and it died. We disposed of it in the street in front of our house.

We went to some waterfalls today, it was super fun. We saw some monkeys. One of the Elders touched it and it almost attacked him, it was super scary and super funny haha.

- Elder Hymas