Wow. Sounds like you all had fun this week. This week has been a little
crazy for us. We’ve taught so many lessons this week it’s been nuts.
It’s been going really good though for us. We watched conference in
church this week and so that was good. We’ve taught a lot of good lessons. We started doing this thing I’m super excited about. All the people who are waiting on marriage, we’ve started making “Banco de
Porcos”(piggy banks). We get an empty milk carton, cut a slot in the top, and then wrap it in a piece of paper, and design the paper a little bit with a few inspirational words and a couple sketching. Then on the back we make a chart. A big grid. Then in each of the little boxes we count up by 10 until we reach 1200. We take this to their house, teach a little lesson about budgeting and then ask them to save 10 Meticais a day (I think that’s pretty reasonable) and in about 4 months they’ll have 1200 Meticais. Then after we commit them to saving 10 Meticais aday, we make them take an oath to never take money out of the bank. It’s really a fun little lesson and hopefully it will help. Every time we go back to their house from now on, we ask to see their piggy bank and see how many 10 Meticais boxes they’ve checked off on the back. So I’m really excited to see how this works. It’s been fun to do. We’ve also begun to teach some family night lessons to these families, we have waiting. They’re some of our funnest lessons. We start by explaining family nights, and then we sing, pray and leave a spiritual thought. After all that, we bust out the Jenga and play a few rounds with the family. During the game, we like to explain a little about why it’s important to do family things and how we need to have love in the home, and things like that. It turns out to be a really good lesson, which is super fun for us (we get to play Jenga). It’s been good times.
Elder Harris is good. I like working with him. There are a lot of cool kids on the mission. I’ve become really pretty good friends with Elder Buckner and another Elder named Elder Roylance. You already know Elder Buckner but Elder Roylance went to BYU while I was there too. He’s 2 transfers ahead of me (with Elder Buckner). Elder Buckner’s(new companion) still hasn’t arrived. We think he’ll get here this week or next week at the latest. So ya, we’re all excited for that.
This week our side of the area had 1 baptism. His name is Pita. I super
like him, he knows a lot, and is super good. I also baptized Joaquim
from my old area. He’s good too. He knows the Bible better than anyone
I’ve ever known. It’s been so good. I’ve liked it. So ya, things are
going well out here.
Also like 2 hours after I sent that e-mail to you a week ago I got two packages. The book from California made it great. That was by far the best part of those boxes. It looked like everyone was good. I honestly didn’t recognize a lot of people. Hay-hay looks older. Same with Kathryn and Kate. They all look so much older. I had no idea who Clay was. I could barely recognize him. Ryan looks good.
You’ll have to let me know when he gets his call. I got a feeling he’s
coming to Mozambique and that I’m going to train him... ha. But everyone looked good and it seemed like you all had a good time there, so that was good. Be sure I tell everyone hi. I was looking at the picture of the ocean and just thinking that somewhere over that long expanse of water, on the other side of the world was the Mozamiquean coast. Crazy to think about. But ya, thanks for those, it was super good. It was a good week package wise… Thanks for everything. Hope things are good. And I’ll talk to you all later! Love ya, and miss ya!

Elder Okazaki