Night Market
It was "Teacher Day" and the students gave us a present. They are so nice.
This is Isaac Flake. (He is half Laotian.)He is the newest Elder to arrive to serve here. He took the place of Elder Eckersley who went home. There are still 4 Elders in Laos. He is riding one of the wheel chairs that the church makes for people in need here.
"Teacher Day"
We had one extra missionary who was waiting for a visa stay with us. Elder Hilton (blue tie) was from Liverpool and had the thickest english accent I have ever heard. He has gone on to Thailand now.
They put together this assembly for the teachers on "Teacher Day".
Giant three legged race.
Playing soccer.
Making some good Laos food for our class.
Soccer
Cool Laos fabrics
Seeing this empty basketball court and feeling sad.
I will be with these three guys until the
end of my mission.
Sending off a Laotian guy to serve his mission in America!!! Everyone is so excited for him to get to go to the USA on his mission!!!
Letter:
In Laos, there are these places where you can go to eat called "sin dad". This is my favorite place to eat food. You go sit down at a big table, they bring out a small fire pit with a metal cover and set it on your desk, then they bring out a massive plate full of raw meat. You can sit there cooking and eating meat while dipping it in all their different delicious sauces. They just keep bringing out more meat when you are out. It indeed is a slice of heaven.
When Elder Holmes and I are teaching our English classes, we do a sort of switch off kind of thing. One of us will start class with a speaking warm up while the other is either thinking about what we teach next, or walking around helping to answer individual questions.
I have been practicing a lot of guitar lately. I am not good by any means, but I am learning a lot more chords and getting faster at switching between those chords. Playing guitar really helps me to calm down when we have some free time.
This last week, the Elder who had been here for a year just went home. Now everyone who was in the last group of 4 Laotian Elders are gone and we also got the chance to pick up the last on for our group, Issac. When the other group was gone, I decided to start making more food at the house, so I bought a ton of chicken breasts, potatoes, and other vegetables. I like to make a meal of a chicken breast, a potato, 1/2 of a carrot, 1/4 of an onion, 3 things (heads?) of garlic, 2 stocks kale, clam sauce, other sauce, and cheese. It's pretty dang good.
I went back to Thailand twice in two weeks. The first time was for renewing visa stuff, and the second time was because we had stake conference. I loved having stake conference because the Laos members get to come down to Thailand and see other members. There are about 250 members there and its just a spiritual party. woot woot.
We have got to send off two new missionaries in the last month from Laos! One is going to be a missionary in Texas, and the other is going to Washington. It is very cool to see missionaries coming out of Laos and going all the way around the world to America. The exact opposite thing that I did haha.
Our students in one of our classes decided to cancel class and instead go play some soccer. It was really fun. We played on a smaller inside court. It was really fun.
We had Laos "teacher day" this last week. The students gave us a present. It was a shirt with all of the Laos provinces. It is way cool.
As part of our volunteer service here in Laos, DIC is giving money to the Laos people to make wheel chairs. They have a wheel chair factory where they construct all of the wheel chairs. Every single worker at this factory is disabled in one way or another. There are deaf workers, workers without legs, workers that have legs that don't work, mute workers, and others that weren't there. We have a job to go over to their factory once a month and test out five of their wheelchairs. It is fun because we will get to have fun and get to know the disabled people more. Someone told me that one guy in a red shirt is deaf, so I got out my notebook and wrote "what is you name" in Laos. We had a fun little conversation writing to each other.
It was a good week. also a little crazy. lots of changes.
Love you all, have a good week.
-Elder Barron
