Hello Mother!

Not going to lie… right now I feel like crud. Yesterday, after church Elder Spens and I went into this cartié by the airport and neither of us had water and we were basically in the sun for over 2 hours. I could tell that I was in the process of becoming dehydrated, but we had to continue the work. Now I am really suffering the consequences. I have a nasty head ache and I feel like I am going to throw up and everything else is just not going like I want it to. But that is okay…I am alive and I am in the greatest mission in the world.

Here is something pretty… weird. We (the four Douala elders) were driving home from a little FHE we had last Monday night and we drove by this dumpster overflowing with trash. I was looking at the trash and seeing what people here throw away, and as we were driving by, I saw this homeless man just chilling in the pile of trash sleeping. It was disgusting! Imagine going to the dump and just taking a nap on the pile of crud you find there… that is exactly what it was like… but only worse… because this is Africa. I saw another homeless man as Elder Spens and I were walking by the airport and it was exactly like that scene in "A Knights Tale" when that naked guy walks right by you. He had no care in the world and was just strolling down the street… with absolutely nothing on. I didn’t know if I should say "Bonjour" to him or not because I say hi to everyone I pass… I decided to let it slide.

So that cartié I was talking about at the beginning of my email is called Bafia and it is right by the airport. If you go onto google maps you will see that the two runways make an ‘L’. Bafia is that little neighborhood towards that left of the point of the ‘L’. I love teaching there because you will have planes fly like 200’ above you and it is so loud! When the DHL plane takes off you feel like you are going to go deaf and everything around you is shaking. It is pretty intense. The church is right under the flight path as well so you will be sitting in meetings and everyone has to stop talking because no one can hear when the plane flies over. It is so neat. I really want to find a sweet place like that over at Sky Harbor. I found an alright place but I know there has to be a better spot.

We have a newish investigator named Joseph, and he is a gas man. He has a little shop by the airforce base and whenever people need propane he has a little moto with a trailer and he delivers gas to people who need it. He is very interested in our message and reads a lot in the Book of Mormon. The only problem that this guy has is that he doesn’t stop talking and he asks waaaaaay to many questions. It has been a little bit of a struggle for me because I have been really working on patience when teaching others, so I sit there and listen until they are done saying whatever they want to say and then I will finally respond. Well, with this guy, he talks forever and then he asks a question, so then I go to respond to that question and I get maybe 5 seconds into my question and he interrupts me and talks even more and then asks a whole new completely different question. It drives me up the wall. But I haven’t cracked, so all is well! Pretty soon I am going to strait up tell him that he needs to be quiet if he wants to learn our message. We have been with him since I have been here and we have made very little progress. The only thing making us hang on to him is his desire to learn and understand our message. He tells us all the time that he wants to get baptized and become a missionary… but with the rate we are going at, he will definitely be dead by that time.

Here is an interesting contacting story… so for the first time in my mission I went and did actual door to door contacting and it was so much fun! The first door the guy was working but took our brochure and said he would read it. The second guy was all po’d because we interrupted his ‘nap’ and he said he doesn’t need white men to come to his house to tell him about Jesus Christ… because he already knows about him. So we smiled and told him to have a good day and went to the next door. It was a lady who was cracking pistachio nuts. We walked up to her with big smiles and asked her if we could help her. I am sure she was shocked to the bone to have two white men come up to her and offer to help do manual labor. But she accepted and so we started to help her. The only bad thing about that experience was that we were standing in the sun cracking nuts for close to 45 minutes and there was no shade or clouds or anything that helped us out. Its all good though… we were in the process of giving service and nothing beats the feeling of peace and joy you can get from that. As we were cracking nuts we were also explaining to her the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and answering her questions. I think we had a really good impact on this lady and she really wanted us to come back and teach her more. It was an awesome experience.

We tried contacting again later in the week and I was really in the mood so I said a little prayer and I asked my Heavenly Father to help us find someone who is ready to receive our message. We then went to the first door and there were two women cleaning and they politely told us that they were too busy so then we walked to the next house and we found this man cleaning up in the kitchen. When he saw us he immediately stopped everything he was doing and walked up to us and greeted us with a big smile and shook our hands and invited us to sit down and then he went back inside to get some things and came back out with a Book of Mormon and two of our brochures. He then went onto explain how he had taken lessons from the missionaries for close to two years and how he loved them so much. But then he went onto to tell us why he doesn’t believe our message… I guess after two years of lessons he only learned that we regard Joseph Smith as more than Jesus Christ and that we believe that the faith of Christ died (not true). We tried to explain to him that what he thought about Joseph Smith was completely wrong and what not but he wanted to bash with us… he started arguing about who Jesus Christ really is. He told us that he is a devout catholic and then he went onto tell me that Jesus Christ is not the Son of God because God cannot procreate. He then went onto say that Jesus was a good prophet who did a lot… but that was it. I was super confused… I looked at him and said, “Wait, you are catholic? Are you sure you are not Muslim?” Well, after 10 minutes of talking with him Elder Spens decided that he had enough of this guy and stood up to walk away… but I wasn’t ready to leave this guy so I continued to sit. I put Elder Spens in an awkward situation but that’s alright… it wasn’t our time to leave. I then started talking to this man with all the love and respect I could muster and he immediately changed his mood and at the end asked us to come back. He then turned to Elder Spens and said, “I like this guy (pointing to me) because he speaks well and listens.” That made me feel good… like I am achieving the goal I want to get. We will see what happens with him in the future.

I had a really interesting run in with some JW’s the other day while on splits but I don’t really want to tell you what happened over email… I don’t want to offend some people so I will write you a little letter and then when Elder Thompson goes home in 4 weeks he will mail it to you. I will do that with my photos as well. I’m sorry but I don’t think that you will be getting too many letters from me while I am here in Douala. I spent so much time writing the whole family personal letters and it bugged me that they didn’t even arrive chez-vous. I could go with DHL but that would be close to $70-80 for a letter. Nope! But don’t worry… you will get something about a week or two into May along with everyone else. I refuse to send letters here from Douala.

The missionaries here are in the choir and this Sunday we sang Ce matin-la (That Easter Morn) and it was incredible. I love singing so much. I think the Lord is blessing me with improving my voice skills and overcoming the fear of singing in front of people. Next week I will be singing "A Child’s Prayer" with a sister in my branch so that will be neat. I love that song so much. So that was my week! I can’t believe another week has come and gone…before you know it you will all be driving to the airport to pick me up. I can’t believe how fast time is going. I love it though :) I can’t wait to be reunited with my eternal family! I love you!

Je t’aime,
Elder Schmid