Culture week, Thanksgiving and more Soccer

This week was really great. We taught a lot of English, like normal. This week was a little more exciting than normal because we had Thanksgiving, which was really awesome. To show our thankfulness, the Lao Elders participated in what we called Culture Week.

To explain culture week further, we were trying to live our lives more like Lao people; to be more thankful for what we have. 

So the rules that went with culture week were:

1.  No air conditioning 

2.  No sleeping on a mattress (sleep on the floor)

3.  Budget to 30,000 kip\day ($3-4)

4.  You must use a squatter type toilet (see pictures)

5.  You must wash all clothes by hand.

6.  No speaking English, except for teaching English or when talking to someone who does not speak Lao.

7.  You have to eat Lao food (not Thai food)

8.  You have to eat all meals on the floor.

9.  Put 3 or more peppers on all of your food.

There were also some bonus rules, if you want to follow them, such as taking cold showers or eating 7 or more peppers on your food. The last day I followed all of the bonus rules as well. 

Anyway, we were doing that for a solid week from last Thursday up until Thanksgiving dinner. The only one that we didn’t follow through with completely was speaking Lao all week. We made it about 4 days on that one. It wasn’t too hard to speak Lao all day but it was pretty rough for Elder Blocker, he just arrived and nobody would speak English with him so we switched that one for his sake. 

Another fun thing was, this Wednesday, we went over to a member’s house and he cooked a bunch of food for all six of the Elders, so we ate a full dinner. Afterwards, he brings out these two giant wheels of bananas ( way larger then a bunch you would get in the states) Then he starts passing them out and keeps talking about how Elder Morley once ate 8 bananas. He mentioned that fact about 5 or 6 times. Then I decided I was going to eat 9 bananas, so I did. It was a lot of bananas.  

It was an interesting week, and now I am really grateful for Air conditioning and for mattresses and for American and Thai food. For our Thanksgiving dinner, we ate at a member’s house. It was interesting. It was all the American missionaries celebrating an American Holiday in an Australian member’s house in Laos. She was really nice and made a spectacular dinner. She even found a Turkey and cooked it. It was, by far, the highlight of the week. 

Yesterday, we played soccer again. It was a lot of fun and this time we had about 150-200 people watching the match. This game we got destroyed. We played better but they played their A team players or just some better people. The final score ended up 2 to 6 but we had most of the crowd on our side, so it was a lot of fun.

Well that was about it for this week. We still do not have a church. So we have a lot of free time. Elder Blocker is a great guy. I am having a great time being companions with him.

-- Elder Cheney 

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน
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