So first off the important stuff. This week we had Flora´s baptism and it was awesome! She was so excited and ready. Mimi´s baptism we moved back a week so that her Dad will be able to attend it. It´s acutally a pretty intersting story with her dad. He was the first one of all of his family to start taking the lessons, but then after a little while he kind of took a little detour and got into drinking and all that not so good stuff. But since he started taking the lessons 5 people from his family have been baptized. But anyways, this week we started teaching him again and are trying help him find his way. We sat with him yesterday and he really opened up and expressed how he just kind of lost himself and that he does know how he is going to get out of the rut he´s in. We assured him that we have just the tool to get him out. He expressed how he has seen his family change as they´ve been going to church and as some of them have been baptized (Fulai and Salvador) and how he is kind of jealous. We are really looking forward to working with him and helping him get out of this rut. It´s pretty incredible how the Gospel truly can fix any problem that we face in this life. This Saturday his daughter Mimi should be baptized and then after that it is going to be all uphill for his family. It was great, as we left our lesson with him, his name is Mateus by the way, his daughters came up and thanked us, they hate the route that their dad has taken and they want a responsible father figure again. It was even greater that they realized that the Gospel is just what he needs. I am loving this area!
Now I´ll talk about the other less important stuff. We went on a safari today!!!! It was awesome! We went to a safari park about 2 hours outside of Luanda. About half of the mission went with President and Sister Merrill and Elder and Sister Lopes, one of the brazillian couples. I think the rest of the mission is going next week. But anyways.. It was so cool! As we drove into the park there were giraffes welcoming us, standing in the middle of the dirt rode. That got us pretty excited! It was about a 40 minute drive from the entrance of the park to where we would meet the truck that was going to be taking us on the safari. Once we got to the trucks they took us out and we started our journey! We first went back and saw the family of giraffs that had migrated a little bit more into the bush and they took us up real close to them. Way cool. Then from there we kept going and then we found an elephant up in the trees a ways of the trail. The truck driver had no fear, the second we saw it he started climbing the hill in the truck, driving over trees and what not. He got us right up close to the elephant. Beautiful. After that we kept going and found a group of wildabeasts and their friends the onix. The wildabeasts let us take pictures but the onix got out of there pretty quick when they saw us. It was so beautiful!! There is no way I can come close to explaining what it was like in this email. Sorry... Hopefully you can get some idea from the pictures. We unfortunately didn´t see any zebras or anything else, but we were all satisfied. It was nice to get out of the big city and into Africa.
Well it was another great week! Thanks for all of your prayers and support! Have a good first week of school!
I love you all!
Elder Hyde
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