week 57

Well, this week stats-wise was amazing, but the progression of the area is a bit stagnant. The church is just too far, and it appears that because of this our area will be closing in 5 weeks. I suppose the stake is tired of us missionaries doing everything and the members not trying. I think they are going to try and help them realize their personal responsibility by taking us out.

With that in mind our work has changed a whole lot. We are not really finding any new investigators and we are spending a bunch of time trying to establish 4 group family home evenings. Our hope is that these will strengthen the conversion of the members after we are gone. Unfortunately, they will be pretty much cut off from most outside sources of help when we are gone, so hopefully these will help.

Luckily it appears we will have 1 baptism before the area closes! Keamogetswe is doing awesome! She came back from holidays at her aunt's down in Cape Town and she is super serious now. We are working towards the 8th of Feb. Pretty much every hope I have has been placed on her getting baptized, at least then I wont feel like I wasted the last 3.5 months of my life when I leave this area.

We are really running into the problem of "you can't help those who won't help themselves." We have put a crazy amount of work into this area with nothing coming out of it haha. Okay, that was a lie, we have had little successes, but at times it is hard to see them as such.

Church in Africa can really be quite interesting at times. After the sacrament was finished being passed on Sunday nothing happened for 10 minutes. Literally we sat there in silence. It was bizarre and I'm so very glad we had no investigators there. The Branch President just sat there until finally the Young Men President got up and told him the sacrament was over. After which President just kept sitting there, and finally after a few minutes he got up and continued on with the meeting. Weird.

Anyways, that's about what I've got for now...

Well, hope all is well.

Love, Elder Kelly