This week:
#1 Be careful when and what you sing when in Africa
So its been raining a fair amount here which has been beautiful because we definitely needed it, and it means less dust. However it also makes the roads very muddy and makes it hard to talk with people cause they are all inside. So while we are on our way to an appointment it starts to drizzle. Now I love singing and when it starts to rain in Africa, you sing Toto. It is just a must, gotta do it. That was a bad idea.... first verse was fine, I got to the chorus and sang "I bless the rains down in africa" aparently Heavenly Father thought it would be funny to take that literally. Within two minutes it is Pouring, we are talking buckets. And we still had to walk for about another twenty minutes. We had forgotten rain jackets so we were quite soaked by the time we got to the house and the host went nuts about how we are gonna get sick and all that fun stuff. Hey it was a great break from the dust storms, and it was very very fun to see everyone cowering in shelter and two wazungu just having a ball in the rain. However my slacks were covered in mud by the end of the night.
#2 The many titles of a missionary.
So you get to do a lot of service as a missionary, which as I have already cited includes some wacked stuff in Kenya. This was just cool.
So we teach some "juakalis" which are essentially blacksmiths. They make hammers, axes, chisels, spears, all sorts of cool stuff. And they invited us to come help one day. So I learned how to make my own forge, and me and elder Le made spears completely by hand. We got to heat up the metal, hit it repeatedly with a huge hammer a crap ton of times, it was dope. Sadly we were both working so no one got any pictures. But now I can say I did smithy work on my mission, and it was dope!
#3 many many languages
So me and elder Le speak Swahili a fair amount. And English a fair amount, it is probably about fifty fifty on which language we use. So we have a lot of people want to speak to us, but don't know English, so we speak Swahili and they are kinda surprised but its not uncommon. Elder Le knows some German and I know sign language. Turns out African sign language and american sign language are very similar and I can sign African.
This man is waving us down, and sounds like he is slurring his words ( we thought he was drunk) so we keep walking. He gets more persistent. as he gets closer I see his hands are waving by his face, weird but not terribly uncommon. Not until he gets very close do I realize he is signing and can't speak. I don't know how he knew I knew sign language, but he was very happy to find another signer. So we give him a book I tell him what we as missionaries do. He tells me where he lives (Elder le is staring awkwardly at the guy, we are signing and it is pretty silent so that was funny). I told him we had an appointment but we will return in about half an hour. We went back to where he lives after the appointment and see this lady. We greet her no answer, so we get a little closer, repeat "Habari yako" no answer. She finally sees us and stands up looks at us, we repeat a third time "Habari yako" turns out SHE'S DEAF TOO! I am super excited and start signing and her face lights up, so we talk for a second about her day and I tell her we are looking for another deaf man, so she takes us to ANOTHER DEAF LADY! She was older but was so happy to see I knew sign language so she didn't have to write. We gave them some books and told them to text us if they have any questions, it was awesome and I loved it.
But thats about it for the week. Mom I am not dead yet. I don't have my camera on me so no pics this week pole Sana.
Ninawapenda nyote
Elder Tucker
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