Another week has passed and it has been an adventurous one. I got to go on splits with the Elders who work the University of Georgia campus. Sadly, it was on a day off from school so virtually nobody was on campus. It is a really big campus and pretty nice. That was fun. Got to see the stadium which seats 92,000 where Idaho State University played Georgia a few weeks ago.
Elder Arnett and Elder Mortenson went to a Leadership Training in Lilburn two days in a row last week which meant that I was left behind in Athens. It ended up that one of the four Spanish Elders was assigned to go to the meeting too, so I took his spot. We were on bicycles. Yay, right? And it was raining the first day. So, imagine me on my first day of bicycling, wearing a rain coat that is too big lent to me from the mission home's closet, riding down the white line of a road with cars going by as it rains, I am sweating, and I am humming Let Us All Press On. Quite a picture. The weather got really nice within a few hours though. The biking was nice, but when we would bike somewhere for an appointment and no one was home (this happened several times) it was especially painful.
I got to exercise my Spanish skills, you see. The Elder I was with entered the MTC in April, so while he is definitely comfortable with Spanish, he wasn't an expert. This put on some pressure. Most of the people we visited with and talked to spoke only Spanish. It went really well though. I still spoke a Portuguese/Spanish jumble, but by the second day I was more or less fully in Spanish mode. It was a very challenging, very engaging two days.
We taught a fabulous first lesson to a woman named Sharon. She had LDS friends several years ago that she worked for. She was happy to see us when we knocked on her door. She even offered to make us lunch when we came back for our appointment. I am very interested to see what happens with her. She is out of town for the holiday this week so our next visit will be a week from today. It was very nice to finally sit down and teach a lesson since we have had to be focusing so heavily on simply finding people to teach for so long. Very happy about this.
John Bytheway came and gave presentations this last weekend in Lilburn. Youth from all the stakes in the mission were invited (President King organized the event) and all of the missionaries were also invited. So on Saturday morning all of the missionaries in Athens (13 of us) piled into a 15 passenger van. Two members (who owned the van) drove us to Lilburn. It was a fun trip. There are some excellent missionaries here in the area. John Bytheway gave a very nice talk to us missionaries alone and then we had a pizza lunch followed by the hour and a half presentation to the youth. It was fun to break routine. I got to shake his hand too in case anyone cares.
Then the drama began. Elder Mortenson started experiencing incredible pain in his lower left back. He was in tears, we had to stop at a gas station and let him walk around. We gave him a blessing in the van. He was really really distraught. So we dropped him off in the emergency room with Elder Arnett when we arrived back in Athens. I went back to apartment complex and retreived our car and I carpooled with the Spanish Elders so they could drop me off with our car and then they all drove off in their car. That didn't make sense, but it's beside the point. I got there and he was still waiting for treatment (EMERGENCY room, yeah right), but the pain had subsided.
They gave him an IV, and pain meds (which made him considerably loopy), then took him to get a CATSCAN. Turns out, he has a kidney stone in his left kidney. This entire process took about 3 hours. Then we left the hospital, Elder Arnett driving (because Elder Mortenson's pain meds are narcotics and made him crazy and he would fail a DUI test if he had to take one). We got his prescription filled and went home for dinner. It was a wild day. He is still waiting for the stone to pass. Still on the medication whenever it starts to hurt him.
Elder Mortenson and I had the chance to go out one night and do work with a member while Elder Arnett went down to a suburb of Athens with anther member to teach a lesson. Turns out the Sister we were with is one of the funniest people on the planet. We were in her car. She is about 50 years old and lives alone. We visited four different people with her (two of them were scheduled appointments) but they all fell through. So we were driving all over town with her. For instance, there was a road we were on with four speed bumps. Every time, her poor little car would scrape them no matter how slowly we traversed them. She laughed so hard every time it scraped. We went so slow over one that we stopped moving before we rolled over it. She kept saying "I am a looooww rider" and cackling. After we cleared all the bumps she said "I'm going to have dents for days under my car!". She also said hilarious things like "Oh, and my oldest son is Pentecostal. Yeah, he is kind of way out there. Oh well, you win some and you lose some." Followed by cackling. So basically we were laughing all night with her though we ended up, sadly, without much that actually worked out. However, we returned to one of the homes where we had an appointment earlier that had fallen through on the way back to the Sister's house. We found them home, re-scheduled, and found out that the Sister we were with used to work with the lady with whom we'd had the appointment and they liked each other. It was kind of cool and made the night worth it I think.
I saw Elder Gneiting (the one I traveled down here with who was my MTC roommate) at the John Bytheway event. We are so excited to be here. It has been a long two weeks. Yet is has been amazing. What a whirlwind. Thanks to those who have written! It is a blessing!
Have a fantastic week.
Elder JOSHUA BODILY
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