November 3, 2014

Everything here is pretty much on the same track as before; The weather continues to get better, though still intermittently interrupted with cold, rainy days.

I'm not positive if I mentioned this last year; though I'm pretty sure I did; Halloween in this country is a joke. Not a single house had decorations up, for one thing. I reckon it gets really out of hand back home, but there's always that good middle ground of just enough into the holiday, but not too much. At home, people like to either skirt or totally defy the line between good and way too much, whereas here everyone quietly resides within the "I really don't care about this holiday" zone. There was one group of kids going trick or treating, and out of the eight kids within the group, only one was dressed up, and even then only dismally so. Apparently white pajamas and an afro pass as a costume around here.

BUT

Looking on the bright side, Guy Fawkes day is on the fifth, so that'll be cool. I'm not sure on all of the details, but it's a holiday that celebrates some dude trying to blow up parliament (ironically enough, since this is the only time of year when you're allowed to buy fireworks). If the weather holds out (and I pray it does) the town will be holding a (reportedly massive) fireworks display. I remember last year for Guy Fawkes, one of the members bought around $500 worth of fireworks, and we lit 'em all off with him. Then a wee while after that as we were reading through the Missionary Handbook, I noticed a sentence that I had previously somehow never internalized, which mentioned something about how we are not supposed to handle fireworks or explosives of any kind. Whoops. So with that in mind, I will not be handling any this year, but I will be quite pleased at the opportunity to watch a few.

On another note, we finally got most of our garden planted. We still need to put in the potatoes, watermelon, and taro. Which we should be doing this week, along with a few more of the member's gardens. Turns out my companion and I are on a committee with two of the members that are supposed to get everyone in the branch self-sustaining. Apparently I'm the mechanic. I'm totally fine with that, so long as this committee's mechanic is only required to work on single cylinder dirt bikes. Not sure how long that'll pan out for.

I was supposed to have some more pictures to send this week, but I didn't get my hands on them yet, so hopefully next week I'll have em.
 Until then,
 Ka Kite Ano