First Missionary Farewell for Us

We recently attended our first farewell for missionaries leaving our mission to go home.  I was presiding because President Sackley is touring the mission in Pakistan with his wife.  So I got the "last word" in at the meeting, since I was asked to say something to these fine Elders.  Elder Bunga to the left and Elder Podi to the right, are very energetic young men and a joy to be around.  My first encounter with Elder Bunga was at the bowling alley for a zone activity.  He was on my lane, and after seeing me gutter the first 2 frames told me he was going to beat me.  Well we know how that went - once you make a challenge everything reverses.  He started doing worse and I got better.  It was a fun exchange.  Elders from India are generally older when they come out, which is the case for both of these Elders.  Elder Bunga is now 27 and Elder Podi, 25.  The farewell included a slideshow of the Elders throughout their missions, and small talks/testimonies of the Elders leaving.  We had about 100 members that came to see them off.

Eating yogurt the hard way

The other night, Elder Stevens was eating India's version of yogurt.  It's about 4 ounces of liquid yogurt.  He took off the lid and was licking the yogurt off the foil lid (surely I'm not the only one that does this...) and without paying attention, poured the yogurt down the front of him.  He just took his spoon and ate it off his shirt (isn't it interesting what you'll do when you're in a strange place).  We found out today that that 4 ounces cost about $1.50 (another good reason to eat it off the shirt).




We've been asked to teach Institute (scripture study for adults 18 and older) for those in the 2nd and 3rd Branches - those in the building where we attend church.  We had about 40 people, which we understand is probably on the low end.  We found a use of our  "electronic toys" (iPad) by taking their picture, emailing it to ourselves and then creating a picture book.  Because we have a hard time understanding the accent, we had each student type in his/her name into the subject line, so we could associate a name and a face.  To our surprise when we got home, we had a student named Kuldeep Kmart (Kuldeep is correct, Kmart should have been Kumar).  Of the blessing of Apple's typing auto-correct feature.