HI!
Merry Christmas!! I can’t believe it’s that time of the year already. It has been hot out here and rainy. Luckily for us the hard rain only has been coming in burst and the rest of the time it just mists. It’s been super fun though because we have these huge mud boots that go up to about the bottom of our knee caps and we get to use them on rainy days. A lot of the time we’re in the thick of our area, we walk down
flooded trails with water that has almost come over the top of our boots so that makes things really interesting and fun. I actually enjoy the rain here. We get wet but it’s no big deal. We just take it, and it
actually feels good. It’s way better than the alternative of a hot sun.
Don’t worry though, there are no Crocodiles in Munhava. Munhava is like the town (Littleton) and Sofala is like the state kinda (Colorado).. So ya we’re in Sofala but Sofala is a big place.

We kinda took a blow this week with regards to our investigators. The
Government here isn’t recognizing religious marriages so the cost of
getting married is still at over 1000 Meticais. By law they should
recognize our marriages but the government is a little corrupt so
they’re not doing it. Its super lame because it really should just be 300 Meticais, which is manageable for the people here in Munhava but 1000 is really a lot of money for people in our area. Their rent here is probably around 200 Meticais per month, so it makes things pretty hard. Which is too bad because we need to find family’s and baptize them for the church to grow but it’s almost impossible to get people married out here. So that was a disappointment for us this week, however, on the upside we’ll be baptizing another investigator this Sat. His name is Luis and is a really good guy. We’ll also probably be giving a baptism date to another investigator named Joaquim this week too.

It was good to hear about The BYU game. Glad they won. I read dad’s
re-cap of the game to Elder Buckner. He seemed to like it. Seems like
BYU always has those big games where it always comes down to the last
play. Also nuts to hear about the South African Sisters. I can’t believe that they got pulled out of that country. Didn’t sound like they had many of them in the first place. I think there was a member sister here in Beira that is going on a mission in South Africa. I wonder if she was one of the sisters that got re-assigned. We didn’t hear anything about that. We don’t have sisters here and we don’t get any information from the outside world so ya.. wow. Well, I don’t think I’ll write a whole lot because I’ll just talk to you tonight (tomorrow
morning for me..).. So hope all goes well, Feel free to open that package before or after I call, doesn’t make any difference to me. Tell Andrew good luck. Maybe you could bake some banana bread and say something like I’d go banana’s to go to the dance with you.. I don’t know. It feels like such a long time since I was doing that. It honestly is sometimes hard to remember stuff that happened before the mission, my head is so packed with Portuguese and Preach My Gospel.. Well I’m super excited to talk to you guys tomorrow too. It ought to be really good! I’ve got to go,they are closing early today and I had no idea they were. They just told us... Well, Love you all and miss you!

Elder Okazaki