We were visiting a member and I stole a tiara from her little girl and she got mad at me.
We went out visiting members and brought this sister with us to find their houses.
You can see the little girl whose tiara I stole sitting on her mom's lap in this picture. She's pretty cute.
We sang, "Love At Home" with their family.
This family we are with has a son named Tiger currently serving his mission in Texas. I got to be here in Laos for the send off. They are an awesome family!
This is a woman who is deaf. She taught us Laos sign language, it was way fun.
Our students were all so happy because they all passed english class this semester. This was a small class of 6.
We had a pizza party to celebrate.
We all got together to decorate for the big Christmas party.
We got to teach the primary children for church on Sunday. We kept the kids attention. It was fun.
This sister made us all ties for Christmas!
Way nice!
Chandler and I are new companions. Great guy!
More class parties.
We got the chance to ride elephants!
Headed out to plant rice on Christmas day.
There was a wedding in the branch that we went to. It was neat to see.
A teeny weenie banana.
Cool sunset over Laos.
Laotian nativity.
My Letter:
So going into winter, I heard from a lot of Lao people the cold season lasts only 10 days here in Lao. I thought that was kind of funny because I didn't think it was going to get cold at all and I thought their point of view on "cold" is a little different because of what they are so used to here. It actually blew my mind how one day was as hot as ever, and the very next day, I actually wished I had a jacket for the first time in one and a half years. It got down to about 50-60 degrees. That was the most amazing weather ever. I was so grateful for the cold. But just as fast as it started being cold, in 10 short days, it was back to the normal 90 degrees. I couldn't believe how actually accurate their prediction of the weather was. It was cold for exactly 10 days and then winter was over. Weird.
We have got a few bad sicknesses going through our house here. First, Chandler and Isaac got it, then Noah, and last of all me... I can feel the bug starting to ease off though.
We completely finished all of our English classes in this last week. We had to make 4 different finals, give the tests to all of the 4 classes, grade 4 classes worth of tests, and give all the tests back. It was a lot of work to grade all of the tests, but we got it all done in time. Every once in a while, there are some funny answers the students will give us. One specific one I remember was when we asked one of our beginner classrooms to write the five vowels (A,E,I,O,U) and they actually wrote U,R,I,N,E. I would be pretty surprised if they even know what that word means, but if they did know they still got three out of five points, so that was a pretty good word to chose to write.
At the end of one of our english classes, the cleaning lady walked in to start cleaning while we stayed later to grade tests. We tried to say hi to her and soon figured out she was deaf. For about 30 minutes we just sat there writing on the board in Lao and learning some Lao sign language from her. It was really fun. She taught us how to say all the numbers from 1 to 999, teacher teach student, sister, brother, age, height, and meet again. It was fun. That place we teach at is a hospital for helping people who are disabled. They employ a lot of disabled people and since then, I have met two other people who are deaf and I can have a small conversation with them. It is fun seeing their face when they see we can speak a little Lao sign language. (Lao Sign Language and American Sign Language are different.)
Our fridge was smelling so dang bad for the last few days and we couldn't find the source of the smell, so I took everything out of our fridge and wiped it down, but it still smelled horrible. We decided to just take the whole fridge out of the wall, and we found out there is a little water catcher that goes to the back of the fridge, and apparently some of my melted chicken juices went back there and stink, STANK, STUNK!!!!
We had a really cool Christmas party with the two branches. My favorite part was the live nativity given by the primary children. It was so cute.
I officially got moved to a different branch. I'm going to be in Branch 2 for a while now. That branch's area is all of Laos outside the city of Vientiane. I'm really excited because there is a lot of little kids in Branch 2. There are also a lot of investigators learning right now. Next week we should have a baptism for someone named Gong who is about 16 years old.
On Christmas Day, we got to go 2 hours up north to the rice field of one of the members and we helped him plant rice. It was a lot of bending over and my back was on fire, but it was so fun. It was definitely the best Christmas present I could have asked for. Except for maybe a nephew from Quincey, but that didn't happen, so this was the next best thing.
Life is good here in Laos. I feel so at peace and happy nowadays. I hope everyone else is having a good time. Thank you for all of the emails that I receive! They are appreciated a lot!
-Elder Barron
