We went down to the river to take some pictures. 

We are some legit photographers.

We were being creative.

This is the path we took to the river.

That dragon thing is across the river in Thailand.

This was on a plane ride to Bangkok for Visa stuff.

 Inside the airport they had some cool golem statues to protect the people.

 A picture of Chandler Coomes. What a man.

 This is Boonlouam. 

A great member of the church.

 A group picture with a dam behind us.

 Noah teaching.

Sometimes their translations are funny.

This weeks update:

One way Noah and I have been trying to do work is doing family history with the members. So far we have helped three people to put their family trees online on familysearch.org.  I am having SO MUCH FUN helping them. It is pretty cool how good people feel when they can type their grandparents names online with their children and just see it connected to their own name. We were helping a 74 year old man, his tree was so interesting. His name is Boonlouam. His grandparents were born in 1900. He had 2 siblings who were alive, but everyone else who we put in information for, had died already. None of Boon's siblings are members, so they will probably never get the chance to put in their information. If Boon died without putting his family history online, that would be information that would be gone. No way to get it back. Laos keeps no sort of records about family history. Noah and I are trying to help at least 1 member every week to put in their information.

There is a young man from Vientiane Laos 2nd branch who recently left on his mission. His name is Tiger. Usually, the missionaries coming out of Thailand and Laos serve in Thailand for a month while their visa gets worked out. Tiger is called to go to Texas soon, but he has been in Thailand waiting for his visa. For some reason, he had to fly up to Laos for a short time to do some visa stuff, so he came up in this last week and stayed with us for a few days. He is the first full Laos person to serve in Laos. Which is so cool. He has left and is about to go to America, but it was just really fun to be with him and go around to all of our classes with him.

Noah and I had an interesting thing happen to us as we were going to teach an English class. I was about 20 yards ahead of Noah and we were on our bikes and a big truck rolls up next to Noah. This guy is wearing big black sunglasses and looked like he was Laotian. This guy yells at Noah, "Hey, are you guys mormons?" (Whenever people ask us this on the street, it is very scary because it is illegal to proselyte our church at all. For instance, this man could easily have been a spy for the government trying to get us to say something illegal. Those guys exist and we have to deal with them every once in a while.) Noah said, "We are English teachers who work for Deseret International Charities." (We don't lie at all. We also don't do anything illegal. The rules are just strict.) Then he said, "Yeah, are you mormons?" "Yes, we are members of the church, but we are not missionaries teaching people about it." "Well, can I talk to you?" "Um... you can follow us to our class that we are about to teach and we can talk some more." "okay." So this guy follows us in his truck to our English class. We get to know him some more and he says he is from California and he used to learn about our church from guys who wear the same clothes as us. Then he moved to Laos and became a member of a different church that was nationally recognized as a church in Laos, unlike our church. (Basically, the rules don't change for this other Christian church than for us for being nationally recognized, but they appear on the map, and they can be more blatant about where they are. I'm not super sure what all the differences of being nationally recognized are, but I know that our some leaders in our church are coming to Laos in the next few months to try to get it nationally recognized. That would be awesome.) We tell this guy that we aren't allowed to tell him anything about our church unless we are literally in the church building, so we got his Facebook, sent him the location of the church, and told him what time it starts.  Last Sunday, that same guy showed up after church and we got to give him a tour and give him a Book of Mormon to read from. 

This last week, my visa was about to expire in Thailand. I got to fly back to Thailand to renew it with all of my friends from our MTC group. Two of them weren't there, so that was really sad, but it was a blast. I remember being in the exact same place a year ago, seeing all the older missionaries. Time is passing and it just feels weird. Until next week.

-Elder Boston Barron