The Dust Is Back...

This week was honestly pretty good. It was slow here and there, but overall it turned out to be a good week. Summer is really starting to turn up around here and people are taking off to the country side so the city is starting to feel smaller. It's weird to see all these things repeat from last year. It feels like I just got here. The hotter weather made more dust storms this week too. The one we had this week was wild. It felt like we were on Mars, the whole sky turned red and this enormous dust cloud enveloped the city. Then it started to rain, and when the rain hit you it passed through so much dust that it left dirt marks all over our jackets and pants. It was kinda crazy, I've never seen anything like that before. 

This week we didn't get to meet with all our investigators, school schedules are getting kinda crazy. But we did meet with this one girl we are teaching. She is related to the family we met and teach. The mom of the family was out in the countryside working so we couldn't meet with her.  But the girl said she still wanted to meet with us, so we did that. We've been teaching her and she is awesome, she is going to be baptized on May 11th actually. As we've been teaching her we've talked about the spirit and we asked her if she ever felt the spirit. She said she has had some stressful days at school but she prayed and felt peace afterwards. It's pretty cool to see the spirit work the same way in other people's lives as it does in mine. But yeah, she's pretty cool, she is 16 and goes to high school. We invited her to mutual and she came, but she just wanted some English help from us. So we asked her to stay but she said she is super shy, and gets bullied in high school because her cheeks are kinda red. So I told Scrimsher and Teasdale that and we made all the other kids invite her in and play some cards and ping pong with her. She seemed to really like it, and then she texted us after she had to go saying she was super happy and felt awesome that she had some new friends. It was kinda touching. Yorke and I are pretty happy to see her not feeling so lonely. 

We found a pretty decent restaurant this week in a Buddhist Meditation center. It's literally the building that touches our church building, pretty funny. We go in there to eat and run into some people we know from English who run the meditation class which was a huge coincidence. But we ate there and talked to the workers, they are all super nice people. I have a lot of respect for the Buddhists. We walked around their meditation center, it was pretty cool. It was weird to me that how they worship mountains though. I like mountains don't get me wrong, but it was weird to me that they worship something so inanimate. It made me appreciate more that I worship a God who is like us, and looks like us. 

We had Zone Conference this week. Nothing too big happened. They did allow us to use Facebook though which was nice. So we are all cleared to go on there. We don't get our phones until June 1st. But they want us to buy them starting in 2 weeks. Other than that we talked about the Book of Mormon and hows to use it better in lessons and stuff. It was a good little break, pretty fun.

English is going good. The semester is ending here in the middle of May, so the students are getting pretty burnt out from finals and stuff, so we are trying to make class easier and more relaxing for them. So we play a lot of games now. We played one where we would write english words on the board and they would translate them, sorta as a race. But Scrimsher and I each joined a team and had students write the words on the board, it was pretty much a race between us two haha. It was fun though, I think the students appreciate it a lot. It's crazy to see another year of school almost done. Time is going way too quick out here. 

I heard that Myadag gave a talk in church on Sunday. It was really touching to see that. We don't really do much out here because of the restrictions, and it sometimes feels like we dont have an impact at all. But seeing that I made an impact and mattered to at least one person makes this all worth it. So things are going good. Sorry this week was so boring haha.

-Austin

 I swear I am living on another planet.  So crazy.  And cool.

 View out of our window while cooking Sunday dinner. 

 Zone Conference

 We were at Cox's apartment cooking Sunday dinner.  These little kids saw us through the window and started yelling at us. They kept saying,"Hey! Hey!" They were so cute. 

 Mutual lesson.  See the girl sitting in the back right corner? I swear she is Mongolian Anya. I have almost called her Anya on a few occasions. Kind of funny.