TOMASINA = Heaven

Tamatave also called Tomasina

So as all of you who read my blog last week know, I got transfered this week. So all of the crazyness started on wednesday morning. I woke up and got in personal study and a little bit of comp study, and then we took all of my bags and went and got a taxi to go to the office. I dropped off Elder Monsen with his new companion, and said goodbye to my baby boy (when you train they call your trainee your son). Then all day wednesday I was on a split with Elder Evans from my mtc group. It was way fun to get to work with him for a day. Then that night we went and slept at the Assistants' house. There were so many missionaries there! All of the trainers and all of the trainees were there so we had about 30 missionaries all in one house. It was so much fun!!! We got to meet all of the new missionaries, but we still didn't know who our companion was going to be. Then on Thursday we woke up early and had new missionary/trainer orientation and stuff.

 In that process the mission president's wife fed us breakfast and lunch which was SO good! Then at the very end they bring us all into the chapel and call the new missionaries up one by one and let them open their "mission call". They have a little mission call that they type up that says where they will be working and who their companion will be. It's really fun. So my new companion is named Elder Bingham! He is way cool! He's from Hooper Utah and just barely graduated high school. He seems super ready to work and way excited to be here. He played basketball and baseball in high school, but he's pretty short. About my height.

So after we got our companions at about 3 O'clock on thursday they take us to the bus stop to get a bus up to Toamasina. It's about a 8-9 hour drive which meant we were going to get here at about 11 or 12 and have to have some elders that were alread here come pick us up. But when we get to the bus stop the next bus doesn't leave until 6:30 so we just decided to wait for it and go that night and get the ride out of the way. I was thinking that I could just sleep the whole bus ride here and there wouldn't be any problem... yeah, I was wrong. It has to be the most curvey road on this planet. And the fact that we were in a huge bus did not mean that we took the curves slow. So I tried to sleep and almost fell out of my chair about 30 times. haha But we finally pulled into Toamasina at about 3:30 in the morning on friday. We had to call Elder Johnson and his companion to come pick us up and help us get to the house. That's about all I remember of that night. I was pretty out of it.

 

Elder Bingham and I are white-washing which means that neither of us has ever worked in this area so we don't know anyone or anything. So for the last three days we have just tracted and contacted a ton and tried to build some kind of a program. I am so excited to be here! People are so nice and almost every single door we knock on we get invited in! The trick is finding people that are genuinely interested and want to change. But this city is paradise. When i started walking around I literally thought I was in california. yes, there are still small shacks with tin roofs, but there are palm trees everywhere and the whole city has the clean fresh breeze coming off of the ocean. Yeah, that's right. I said the ocean. We live like a 5 minute bike ride away from the ocean! We went and walked on the beach on saturday night and it brought back so many memories of california beaches. But I'm so so excited to be here and to help these people come to a knowledge of the true church and to help them feel God's love for them. I hope everyone has a great week! 

Love you all!!!

Love, Elder Glazier