Hey yall it's been kind of a crazy week here in Jamaica. I left the MTC at 3 am and got rushed to the airport. I almost missed my ride to the airport but we don't need to talk about that part. I got onto both my flights from SLC to Atlanta, and Atlanta to Kingston. There was only a little over 7 hours worth of flying, but the layovers and time change made it so I didn't arrive in Jamaica until 9 pm EST. Me and like 18 other missionaries arrived who had come from their reassignments because of their visa had come in so we had to take like 3 different cars to get us all to the hotel we were staying in for the night. We stayed in the nicest hotel on the island supposed but it wasn't that impressive. The lobby was really nice but the average motel 6 will beat the actual rooms any day of the week. The next day all of us went to the mission home/Kingston branch church building for like 8 hours to have our interviews and meeting to find out where we'd be for this transfer.
I
found out I'd be going to Portmore with my pal Elder Stone. Portmore Is
the next town west of Kingston. It's a pretty coll place and I'm
supposedly getting spoiled with one of the only apartments to have hot
water and a clean shower. It's a pretty cool place and It feels like
home. Elder Stone is a little bit of a grandpa out here. He's been out
for about 21 months so he heads home after next transfer. He's a stud.
He's from Mapleton Utah and threw Javelin in high school so that's
pretty sick. We got along pretty well and haven't had any problems. We
live with another set of Elders and we share the area with them as well.
One of the Elders from the other group was here last transfer, so they
took all the people that they were teaching. Because of that me and
Elder Stone are stuck at square one. We've been grinding the street
contacting and phone calls and we've gotten a little bit of success from
it. We haven't taught any lessons yet but we're working on it.
We
got to meet a couple of the members here on Saturday night. We played
Domino's with some of the members and it got pretty heated. Domino's is a
big thing around here and all the Jamaicans get pretty heated about it.
There was lot of yelling and I maybe understood 1/8 of what they were
actually saying. Afterwards we played football (soccer for you white
folk) with the Elders quorum for their weekly activity. We got
permission from the zone leaders to stay out past our 7pm curfew for it.
I thought I was pretty decent at it before I left, but these 40+ year
old men had me on skates. I literally couldn't do anything.
Church
was pretty interesting here. I'm blessed again to have an actual ward
in my area with like 100ish people that showed up. People here are
really big on church and Christianity. It's like Joseph Smith type stuff
with how many churches there are around here. Because people are so big
on it here, Sunday school was a little Interesting. Whenever the
teacher would ask a question someone would like yell the answer back to
them. I've never been to a Southern Baptist church but I'd imagine one
of their sermons would sound similar. All the kids here are super dope
though.
Interesting things about Jamaica that I didn't expect:
• weed. Lots and lots of weed. Like almost 1 in ever 10 guys I pass down the street are smoking a blunt
•
the language. It's not too bad to understand and I'm getting better
everyday, but they have a really thick accent and say words weirdly so I
don't know what they're saying half the time
•
homophobic. These people literally hate gay people. I've been told to
never say it or else i might get shot. I'm not willing to try and test
it out. Supposedly they tried to have a gay parade a couple years back
but then all of the guns and ammo were suddenly bought off the shelves a
little but before it happened, so the police had to shut it all down
before they had a mass massacre on their hands.
•
How poor and sketchy it really is. Even though I'm in one of the nicer
areas there's so much trash everywhere and it's sad to see the living
condition some people are in
•
the driving. People here drive on the left side of the road, which is
already really weird. I thought we were gonna crash on the first couple
days just from the fact that we were turning into the wrong lane. Then
you add in the type of driving. It's literally GTA out here. Drivers are
weaving in and out of lanes, people are walking up and across the
streets trying to sell you stuff, and everybody uses their horn nonstop
basically. On the first day driving to my area I thought we were gonna
hit at least 10 people, 5 wild dogs, 15 cars, and a mailbox or 2. The AP
was kinda scaring me the first day when he was driving a manual 15
passenger van while going between phone calls with the other AP and
President.
• taxis. They
don't have busses here. They have taxis. The system is kind of messed
up too. They only drive from one spot to the other all day. To get
across town you need to get on like 4 different taxis one way. Then
another 4 back
Sorry this email was so long. There's a lot to explain about Jamaica. Don't be afraid to email me back i don't bite lol
Comments
Post a Comment