Just one of those weeks

 Wah gwan, hope everyone is doing alright and everything is going well in yalls life. This last week was just one of those weeks where the days feel super long and the week felt even longer. These weeks suck, especially when you want to go out and do stuff and be effective, but everything falling through makes it hard to do that, thus making everyday feel super long. However, I do have a couple of decent stories for this week's episode so make sure to stay tuned. 

This last week we have received a couple of Facebook referrals. Nothing crazy, maybe like 3-5 if i had had guess off the top of my head. However, that's a lot for my area. It's straight bush basically and everyone lives in the bigger city that's 10 minutes away. Anyways we were excited to call these referrals up because we get literally none. We call them up and we get the same answer from all of them. "Do you guys have girls at your church? I want to get married to a girl at your church. If girls were there I'd come every week for the rest of my life." Apparently the sister missionaries made the Facebook ad and so they had a picture of them on it holding the Book of Mormon up or something like that, and it attracted them enough to get the people straight out of the bush to put in their information to try and talk to those sisters specifically. Needless to say, we haven't called them back, and we probably won't won't call them back. Apparently the Mormon girls are as attractive as everyone says they are. 

Next story comes from just the other night. We just had an amazing visit with a member that I've been trying to get ahold of and set up an appointment with for the 9 weeks that I've been here and we were just walking home feeling good. The lesson went a little late, but it curfew still hadn't hit. It was getting a little dark though. It was at that kind of eary dark that's in video games all the time. Anyways we were walking home and on the way home we encountered this rasta. Now, a lot of rasta these days will either shout at you, leave you alone, or literally anything. Some of them are pretty unpredictable, so it's in your best interest to stay on your toe, especially for this guy. This one was pretty upset about something or other. His patois was pretty thick and I wasn't focusing too hard on trying to understand it, but he was definitely yelling at some people near him, or just around them in general. Also I need to mention that he had an old rusty machete in his hand at this time as well. As were walking past them, he's yelling, swinging his machete around and just everything in general. Right as we walk past him he smacks his machete on a stone bench literally 3 feet away from us. We promptly started walking a little faster and got out of reach as soon as we can without making it obvious. I've never really been scared of anything that I've seen out here, but that made my heart race just a little. 

It's been raining a lot more recently as well. We grabbed a taxi to take us all the way into the bush to visit our recent convert and on the way up it just started raining cats and dogs. The heavens were literally opened. The front windshield of the car started to fog up, and apparently this taxi driver had never had this problem before so he just started to wipe the fog off with a rag he had on hand instead of cracking the windows a little bit, or blasting the AC or literally anything to get the hot air out of the car. It was so fogged up that I literally couldn't see the front of the car, and this man is driving like the usual Jamaican taxi driver. Way too fast, way to unsafe. Somehow we made it to our spot safely, by literally the grace of God. However, when we made it to the spot, it started raining even harder so we sat and watched it for like 45 minutes and then we had to catch a taxi back down to the church to make it to a meeting. We didn't even get to meet with the member. 

Jamaica is literally GTA in real life. Earlier this week there was a literal bank robbery in the town next next us. The exact same bank that i pull out my money from and everything. I didn't realize that bank robberies still existed. I thought they were an old fashioned thing that were talked about in stories, but apparently they do in Jamaica, and they stole like 50 million JMD. The whole scene included guns, shooting said guns, 5 people getting hit (none died or were super critical), and get away cars with crazy driving. Literally GTA.

On a more uplifting note, we studied Pres. Nelson's "Peacemakers needed" talk from this last general conference in April in Elders Quoromn yesterday. We had a really good discussion on how we can avoid contention overall as a whole and how we can become better, peaceable, servants of God. I encourage yall to think about that for yourself.

Anyways to end this email off, with the new standards coming out, my mission president has stated that we aren't allowed to text friends on messenger, or Google chats or anything like that. Strictly letters or email, so if I don't respond to your text that's probably why. However, please don't be afraid to email me.

Likl more,

Elder Turnbow