Cooking Jamaican style

Hey everyone!

It is raining super hard right now.. I'm drenched emailing this. Today we had a zone P-day. We all met up in Portmore and played basketball for a few hours. It was sweet, and i got some new sun burn lines :) my arms now look like neopolitan ice cream. :) from my elbows down are brown, between my elbows and where my t-shirt ends is red, and the rest of me never see the sun so ... very white :).. I have the same effect on the back of my neck too. :) Its pretty goofy lookin. But basketball was a lot of fun, there were two zones there (Kingston zone and Spanish Town zone (thats us))..... We played zone on zone quite a few times, and we lost. But it was still fun. Some of the other Elders I met are pretty cool. Oh, and then we ate at burger king afterwords... that was a treat. :) I love Jamaican food, but getting an american hamburger rarely happens so i was lovin it. :).. I have fallen in love with the new steakhouse burger... I had my first one, and now I think i can't ever turn back. You gotta try it if you haven't. haha. After that we went to a store called Mega Mart because Elder Knowlton said I had to see it. When i walked in, I almost went into shock.. it had AC and it was basically a Cosco or Sams club.. I thought i was back in the US.. so we walked around and looked at all the cool things we couldn't buy... and then left haha Oh and on the bus ride home, I got stuck between this fat guy who was chugging a bottle of alcohol the whole way back, and the window... it was an interesting ride... i had a really weird conversation with the drunk guy.. he seemed to think that i was there to hear his whole life story and started to like confess crazy things to me.. so i just kinda pretended i was asleep when there was a break in the conversation and he slowly stopped talking to me. haha

But other than that, this week hasn't been too eventful. Me and Elder Knowlton have kinda been having a hard time finding places from peoples directions, so we made a giant map!! It covers the whole wall in our study room.. I don't have my camera, this week, but next week I'll send a picture. It was so satisfying to finish it. :) I think we'll have an easier way finding our way around now. Our area is huge! and is a really intricate complicated maze. But we're getting there.. We have still been doing a lot of tracting to find people who are willing to act on our message. At times its really frustrating, because what we can share really changes peoples lives, and makes it possible to make it to heaven, yet its so hard to find people who are willing to sacrifice to find out if its true and follow it... But we do have a lot of fun meeting people, and its even fun (more funny i guess) the ways we get rejected sometimes.. But the work progresses, slowly, but surely.

This week is going to be a cooking adventure.. Me, Elder Knowlton, and Elder Jones are pooling our money together to buy Jamaican foods, and we are going to be cooking Jamaican style for the week. :) I'm really excited. I love the food here. Especially rice and peas (rice and kidney beans cooked in a very special way) with curry chicken. Or chicken with cornmeal dumpling. :).. Basically, we should be eating well this week.. Its cheaper too.. We'll see how it goes

This week in my scripture reading, I read the Book of Mosiah in the Book of Mormon. I really love it, the story and the way that everything connects amazes me! Oh, also, here one of the major beliefs in a lot of the churches is what is called getting in the spirit. Basically its where someone stands up and starts to yell things in a "language" that nobody can understand and their eyes roll back and they start twitching and things, and sometimes they evey take off their clothes (no worries though, the priests and pastors always have a sheet ready to throw on people when this happens).. Its really creepy and looks like posession.. we were really curious where the belief that this is what the spirit does comes from, so we asked one of the ladies we are teaching that goes to one of these churches. She says that thats what happened on the day of Pentacost in the Bible, so we went home that night and studied it, and basically, they read like the first few verses of the chapter and stop there.. and if you read further it explains everything and what really happened.. It just amazes me though how people really can twist the scriptures and use it in whatever way they want... and nobody ever says anything... even if it doesn't go along with anything else in the scriptures. I am really grateful we have a living prophet to lead and guide us. I know with all my heart that the things we are teaching every day are true. My testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ grows every day as I study and teach. The blessings it brings to my life and the life of others is so apparent and amazing. I love it.

But my time soon finish so I have to go...
Likkle more

Love
Elder Kraus