Hello mother,

 

I think I know who I get my teasing skills from... you love to tease me in my emails :) It's okay, you are soooo lucky that... I won't finish that but you know what I would of said :) I LOVE CONGO!!! I am sweating like crazy, but I love it so much. Yes, it is more third world than Cameroon but the difference isn't that drastic. It is very hot when the sun is out and it seems like the humidity changes by the minute. We do a lot of walking and so we are in the sun a lot, and I am already getting more tan. I will have a gnarly farmers tan when I get back. I have adjusted fine to the AC. It is such a blessing. Last night we went to bed and we set the AC unit in our bedroom to 16 degrees celcius... awww yeah! Some nights when we get home, we will go strait to the room to turn on the AC and then we go to another room to close the day and when we come back into our room it is an ice box and I lay on the tiles and listen to Jon Schmidt. La vie est belle (life is beautiful). I talked to the Wheatley's a little about packages and they had one sent to them, but while it was at the post office, people went into it and tore it up, so when they picked up their stuff, it was in a big plastic sack. You can send mail. The address is:

 

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Elder Christiaan Schmid

PO Box 1177

Pointe Noire, Republic of Congo

 

Letters take about 3-4 weeks to get here but I would love to get them :) Some missionaries have gotten packages. I don't know if they went through DHL or not. I'll try to get more info from the Wheatley's. Honestly, I would love it if you saved the money and took the family out to dinner or something. I don't want you to send something and pay an arm and a leg for it to just have it stolen. Just send letters. Letters are the best!

 

Marius loved the ring that he got. I'm sorry that was so expensive... It was almost half that price when I bought mine. He was stoked to have it though.

 

We just went and played basketball and I'm dunking again. It feels so good to jump like that. My shot is a little off but it'll come back.

 

We have amazing investigators over here. They are sincere and love to go to church. We have one investigator who is named Divin and he walks for a few hours just to get to church and then he walks back to his house. The other night after English class we left the church around 6:30 and it was already dark. You feel so bad because it would be sooo easy to give him bus money... like 200 cfa but it's against the rules. He loves to learn and is at the church multiple times throughout the week. He has a baptism set for this Saturday.

 

Our other baptismal candidate is Anna. She has been an investigator since I started my mission. Her parents divorced and both remarried and she lives with her grandmother. Her father is all down for her getting baptized but her mom is completely against it. We had a recommendation all filled out and her dad already signed it and the mom took it out of our hands and ripped it up. We have another recommendation filled out and the dad signed it, but this time the mom will not see it. We called President Jameson to know what we should do and he said that because of her situation (her not living with either of her parents, who are divorced) we are okay with the dad's signature and we can go ahead for the baptism. She just needs to talk to her mom to tell her about what she is going to do and that is it. She is very excited and so are we... it's about time!

 

The president of the branch here loves me and has already promised me a suit for when I go home. We are actually at his cyber café right now... but the internet sucks. It took me about 15 minutes to login to my email account. I didn't have time to read every email I got so I took pictures of them all and I'll read them tonight, so if people don't get a response to their email, it's because I didn't have any time.

 

When it rains here it becomes a huge muddy mess. Your shoes and pant bottoms are always dirty. There is trash everywhere too and it smells very bad. I would take our dump over on the rez over the smell here any day.

 

Elder Davis is awesome and I am grateful we are working together. He can ball me up any day when we're on the court. The kid is amazing. We get along well and we are starting to find that we are similar in a lot of ways. I look forward to the working with him for a while.

 

I have no clue what is happening in Gabon. THE ONLY THING WE ARE WAITING FOR is a French couple... that is all we need. Once they are there, President Jameson can start sending in the young missionaries. We might hear more when we have zone conference in the middle of November.

 

I'm doing well and I am loving my mission so much. I am so grateful that I am here and that I get to experience what I experience everyday. I lay in bed sometimes and it just hits me that I am in the Congo. It's surreal sometimes... and I love it! I love you so much and I hope that you have a great week!

 

Je t'aime maman,

Elder Schmid