May 27, 2013 - Maputo

Maputo is super nice!

   Our house has a dryer!! I haven't seen one of those since the MTC. There is a place called Preimeire where we do our shopping that is huge it makes the Shopright in Beirra look like a Family Dollar compared to Walmart or something. It's funny because I remember the first time I went to Beirra from Nampula I thought Shopright was the best thing ever! Our church is super close to our house and is 3 or 4 stories. There are tons of people to talk to but it's way different. Every one here is in a hurry to get to work or home. I feel like I just got transferred from like Pie Town to downtown Phoenix haha. 

   My companion and Elder Coombs (who just went home) have worked their butts off here and next week we are baptizing a family!! I am so excited! Aderito and Fatima - they are awesome. I really hope the 2 families I helped in Inhamizua get baptized.

    By the way, the picture of the family I sent last week was Candido and Domingas and their son Joao (John) super original. And the things in my hands on the railroad racks were just umbrellas.

     I live in the best house in the mission. The secretaries (Ostler and Miller) and assistants live in our house as well and right now I am emailing you from the mission office. Our district and branch has 8 missionaries. The sisters (the only 2 in Mozambique) are in our zone. They are kind of training each other because they came at the same time and are the first sisters here. Elder Wartena and I have been doing ‘12 weeks,’ a new training program, with them this week. They are doing super well and have already had some baptisms. Our branch is doing super well and this weekend we have a lot going on - our couple will get married Friday, baptized Saturday and confirmed Sunday.

    Well things are going great here and life is good. 

   Have Dad and David write me about Black River through Dads email and next week I can write them back

        Love you guys,

                                  Elder Bigelow

May 20, 2013 - Last week in Inhamizua

Well transfers were super crazy and unexpected  again!

     My streak of always changing comps stays alive. I thought for sure I was going to stay one more here in Inhamizua and see the couples here get married but I just got transferred to the middle of Maputo! Actually to the very first house and area I ever walked in when I first got here in the country! I will be in the same house as the assistants and office elders. I am super excited! I catch a plane tomorrow morning. 

     This week president came up and he did a training for all the district and zone leaders about the 7 habits of highly effective people which was awesome. He has been doing them for a while. I really want to read all of those books when I get home. Also he looked for land for a new chapel in Inhamizua and we got to have interveiws. The Inhamizua elders are going to start going out to Dondo and working once a week as well. There are two families there who really want to be baptized. So my area now should have a lot of success next transfer. My companion will be Elder Wartina from Orem. He is way cool. And Blake emailed me today. 

   I am going from the middle of the jungle here to the middle of a huge city. It will be the 1st time I have really worked in a city except Nampula but it was a lot smaller. A lot smaller. 

     Some Highlights from Inhamizua:

  - the Inhamizua Zombie

  - 2 mac and his album: get dream or die trying

  - Bobo

  - 4 companions in one area: Hoffman, Ostler, Andrade, Awbrey

  - being in the branch presidency

  - Monkeys all over the place by Pinto's

  - Chapas, chapas and more chapas 

  - jungle and machambas everywhere

  - fixing our bikes and helping Pasqua and Amisse get married

  - the two couples we found this transfer

  Our branch is getting a lot better. We have had over 80 people for the last 3 weeks. I am really going to miss this place. I have been here for 4 transfers and have seen a lot happen. Maputo is going to be awesome though. Thanks for the emails. Love you guys

  Until tomorrow’s day!  (It just means ‘see you later’ but a lot of people say it here when they try to say tomorrow) 

                                         Elder Bigelow

Pictures!

More pictures!

 Que bencao ainda mais!!

May 13, 2013 - Inhamizua

Hey guys,

    I got to skype Ransom and Katie after I skyped you, but only for like 5 minutes. I got to see Morris for the first time! Sorry you guys couldn’t hear very well. This week went pretty good though as far as the work. We have two awesome families. Candido and Domingas and Lazaro and Jolena. They are both starting their marriage documents and coming to church. We actually left a Book of Mormon at Lazaro's house because he was late coming back from work and the next time we showed up he had already read all of the intro and the Joseph Smith story and everything and understood it perfectly! It made me super happy. Both of them live in mud huts and they are super humble and really want to do what is right. I really think both of these families will be baptized next transfer.

    I'm glad Dad is doing good and hope you guys have a blast at blackriver! You guys have to send me pics. Well next week we will find out if I'm staying here in Inhamizua or leaving. I honestly have no idea and will be happy either way.

   President Kretley is here this week and we are having a district leader training Wednesday. Super excited.

            Love all you guys,

 Until Tomorrow’s Day

Elder Bigelow

May 6, 2013 - Inhamizua

Wow sounds like you guys had a way crazier week than me. Tell Dad I love him and hope he feels better. You guys will have to tell me all about it on mothers day next week. So here is the plan for calling. The Bueno's have offered to let us use skype on Sunday and I scheduled for 15 thirty our time I have no idea what time it will be there like 6 thirty in the morning I think. Can you guys look and make sure? Also if you could send an email saying if that will work or not and your skype username before Sunday that would be awesome. Can you do like 3 way skypes? Because I super want to talk to Anne and Wes, Ransom and Katie and their kids as well. I don't know if it would be possible to try to set that up before I call? If not don't worry about it. I will check my email right before and if skype won't work I will just call.

      Well this week we had a marriage at our chapel. It went well and we officially have one more married couple in our branch! Hopefully it will show the other unmarried couple it is possible and it is worth it to keep the law of chastity. Pasqua and Amisse were way happy. So we baked them a wedding cake. (If there is time I will send you a picture) But we stayed up forever the night before and it didn't really look too amazing but they loved it!! Said it tasted super good. We did homemade whip cream, chocolate chips and 2 layers with strawberry jelly in the middle. Elder De Oliveira helped us a ton.

   My dreams came true this week and we fixed up some old bikes that were sitting in our chapel to use in our area. They were way trashed so we paid an investigator named Candido who has a little bike shop hut to fix them up for us. He is awesome and I think for sure they will be baptized. Remember these names: Candido and Domingas. They are the next couple to be baptized in Inhamizua. I had division with the zone leaders this week and we taught them the law of chastity and they accepted it and are already working on documents.

      The mission is changing a lot along with the church here in Mozambique!! Beirra is superclose to having a stake and this weekend there were some meetings for the presidencies we went to about how close we are and what we need to do to prepare. Inhamizua branch is way behind the other branches but we are working our hardest to help it. President Kretley wants to be able to start the papers for Beira to become a stake in October! Super excited. They assigned a guy from Beira named Jack Sandies to attend Inhamizua every week and come to our presidency meetings and everything to help out our branch. He is super awesome and served a mission here and in Angola. He is going to help a ton.

      There are only 2 more weeks this transfer and I think I will probably be leaving. I already have been here 4 transfers but we will see what happens. Super cool about our stake presidency! Love you guys! Hope everything goes good this week for Dad.  Until Sunday.

            Elder Bigelow

April 29, 2013 - Inhamizua

Hey guys,

      First off tell Anne and Wes congrats for me! That is supercool. That is way crazy the stake presidency is changing. You guys will have to tell me who the new presidency is.

      This week has been pretty full of things to do. I did division with Manga 3, the other dupla in our house. It went well. This week we have a division with the zone leaders who are awesome, and I am walking in my area. We have been finding a lot of new families but it has been hard to get them to come to church. I feel like everyone just comes to church once and then stops, but things are definitely getting a lot better.

    I wish Bobo could have stayed here. He will be an awesome leader in the church. Have you guys ever emailed him? If you guys don't want to, or think it would be weird, you don't have to, but I talked to him this week and he is doing good.

   This week we watched general conference. Crazy. So first off the energy goes out and so we can't watch it on our little TV.  Our Branch President decides to invite people to bear testimony on what we have already watched while we wait. And after about 30 minutes, the energy comes back on but then our neighbors just start blasting rap! So Elder Awbry and I go talk to them and they finally agree to turn it off. And the whole time there are tons of kids just running around everywhere outside so we go back and this litte kid is in the doorway just peeing all over our front step! At first I was super frustrated, but then I just couldn't stop laughing - only in our branch!

      So this week we also went to Dondo with President Bueno to teach a big group in the chapel there. It was really cool. We taught about the Book of Mormon. They are still trying to decide what will happen with the group in Dondo. I really hope it stays open. We have been having a lot of problems with our house, but our toilet doesn't move around anymore, which is super good news, and we have a showerhead.

   I used a little bit of personal money - sorry - not very much though.

 We made wedding invites for the wedding Saturday! Superfunny, but everyone loved them. It is so funny how nice wedding invites are back at home and the people loved the ones we did on microsoft word and thought they were the coolest thing ever.

    Well tell everyone hi for me

                                        Love you guys!

        Elder Bigelow

April 22, 2013 - Inhamizua

Hey,

    This week has been super busy. We had an awesome zone conference with President and I learned a lot. Our mission is exploding!! It has so much potential. He talked a lot about how we can find and teach new families and one part of the training he talked about working in every phase of missionary work. We should be doing 5 contacts a day and sitting with at least one new family a day. We also got to watch the talk by Elder Anderson that talks about our mission. We are so blessed.

      Well our area is struggling with people to teach that will progress so we tried exactly what we learned in conference and have already found some awesome potential families. We also opened the process of marriage with the member couple and they will get married on May 4th in Inhamizua! We just have to make the cake and somehow make some invites.

     Our branch has been struggling ever since I got here - we just need leaders so if you guys want to move to Inhamizua I can hook you up with some callings and it would just help everyone, haha. I really am learning a lot though being in the presidency.

    This week we are going with Joao Bueno to visit Dondo on Thursday and do some work there. I'm pretty excited. And we got a new fridge this week!! But the bad news is our septic tank is full so I have to get that taken care of today.

       We get to watch all of conference this weekend!! So excited. Life is good. Whenever I think of conference now I am always going to think of the lady me and Elder Lopes invited to watch it with us in Dondo and then she and her husband ended up getting baptized and married after we left.

     I need phone numbers please!!

 Well love ya guys!

April 15, 2013 - One year!

Well this week I have a little more time to write. This week was probably one of the weirdest weeks of my life! A lot of stuff happened - both good and bad. Some stuff I will have to tell you guys all about when I get home, but I will just focus on the good stuff that happened. Elder Awbrey from Louisiana is my new companion and it's awesome. He was in Dondo and so we were already in the same district, but president took missionaries out of Dondo so he came to be my companion.  The other dupla that is in our house are Elder Martins from Cape Verde and Elder De Oliveira from Brasil (who I lived with for a transfer up in Nampula). They are both way cool and I am super excited for our district and our zone.

    This week we have a zone conference with president which should be way awesome. They already had it in Maputo and all the missionaries there loved it.

    Hey well, Bobo got transferred and moved up to Nampula this week. I don't know if I already told you this, but anyways he speaks English at his job and is always looking for ways to better his language. We gave him a Liahona which is like the Ensign in English and he loved it. But I was thinking it would be way cool if you guys could send him an e mail in English and maybe just talk to him a little bit. I'm sure he would be way happy and try to write you guys back. inaciobobo@gmail.com  It is so weird how much he has changed since we first contacted him when he was drunk haha. He loves the scriptures and really wants to help other people. His family might move up there too and they could get taught by the missionaries.

      I watched part of conference this week and got to see elder Anderson's talk that talked about Mozambique - way cool. I'm pretty sure those pictures were taken in Maputo and one in Beira these marriages are awesome and are happening a lot more frequently now and we have had a couple in Manga as well. In fact, Friday there was a collective wedding and we baked a cake and went and helped. A couple that are in our branch are going to get married this month. They are super excited. We should start the process with them this week and then we just have to wait for like a week to make sure nobody rejects it. Also Carvalho and Albertina, some of our investigators, are working on their papers. Papers are a headache but they are about halfway done. They have been coming to our branch for three years! He told me they were already members when I first got here so we weren't even teaching them until I found out. They were taught a lot in the past and then dropped because his documents were in Tete and they were not trying to get them, but after they got dropped he went and got them on his own so they can get married. They have a daughter who was baptized in our church and then died, so they started investigating and found out about temples and how they can live with her again and super want to be sealed as a family. But they are super funny. I'm not sure how old they are but they speak a lot of dialect. I really like them a lot. You might have to send me some cake recipes because Elder Awbrey and I are making the wedding cake for Amisse and Pasqua, the couple that are already members. Please? Thanks!

    Joao Bueno, President Kretley’s first counselor who lives in Manga, is awesome. He is from Brasil but his wife and stepsons are all from Utah. He lives here working for Care For LIfe . They help the people build latrines, learn how to purify water and do a ton of stuff, I actually think it would be super cool to have a job like that but - long story. We got to eat over at there house on Friday and it was super good. His wife made us cookies and we watched conference and talked to their sons who only speak English. It was awesome. I have actually been over a couple of times and they are the nicest people ever.

     Me and Elder Awbrey hardly have any investigators so we have a goal of 42 contacts. we already have 9 today. It is way cool having a companion that really wants to work hard and we can help each other. Our house needs a lot of work so this transfer I have a lot of plans to fix it up.

    Hey did you ever talk to Blake Sanders about his e mail? Can you please try to get it for me? And can you send me your new phone numbers again - I can't find them and never told anyone they changed. And if you can get a bunch of girls to write me I wouldn't complain either just jokin’!

       The mission goes by way fast! It's crazy - a year has gone by! I don't really want to think about it.

      Other good news - the little baraca (lemonade stand on steroids) right next to our chapel didn't blast music during church! I didn't even have to ask once for them to turn the music down. I was banking on leaving last week, so when my president asked me to talk I said ‘yes, but if I wasn't there because of tranfers somebody else in the presidency would have to do it.’ I talked about missionary work.
     I love my mission and things are going good! Our stats should be a lot better this transfer and I am learning a lot. Love you guys!

                                                        Elder Bigelow