Notes from Sam - 3 October 2007

Hi everybody,

Sometimes it just feels so great to be a missionary! Last Thursday we had a tea appointment with a family that had a whole bunch of Primary-age kids. The family lives at the top of a several-story apartment building, and when we got out of our car two of the kids on the balcony of the apartment building (who must have been there watching for us) starting waving to us. When we got up to their flat, the two little kids sang us a song that they’d prepared specially to greet us, and throughout the whole appointment we had a cluster of kids all around us (including two nonmember neighbor kids) asking us questions and showing and telling us things. When we taught our lesson at the end, they were eager to read scriptures and answer questions and tell us all the things they knew about the gospel. It just made me feel good about the world. As we were leaving, Elder Tomita reminded me about the scripture that tells us that we must become as a little child in order to enter the kingdom of God, and I could really see what it meant.

We've found some new investigators since I've arrived, which has been exciting to see. One of them in particular seems particularly promising, a guy who Elder Webb talked to in the street when we went on exchanges a week or two ago. He told us that he's been looking for a church to join (he's tried a couple of them and has not been satisfied); we've taught him twice so far and he's "keen" to keep on learning about the Church. Yay! And even when tracting or street contacting doesn't lead us directly to new investigators, it can be really productive. We tracted in Millom on Sunday, and although we didn't get to teach much at all, we happened to (or, I should say, were divinely guided to) run into two different less-active members who we hadn't met before (although we'd tried to find one of them earlier and failed). Both of them were friendly and said they'd be happy to have people visit them.

I can’t really comment authoritatively on the accent of the Manchester character in [the comic strip] Get Fuzzy – I’m about three hours north of Manchester right now, and apparently British accents are particularly distinctive and region-specific, changing significantly in only ten miles – but a number of the phrases he used in that comic strip sound very familiar: people are always saying “alright” (in a way that almost leaves out the L), and I’ve definitely “summat.” I think I’ve also heard people using “and that,” although it hadn’t jumped out at me before I read the comic strip. I’ve noticed a couple of other things about the Barrowian accent: people use the word “youse” as a second-person plural (a la “y’all”) and the vowel sounds from “boat” and “but” are pronounced almost identically. So when people say “Barrow,” it’s almost more like “Bar-uh.” At the open house the other day, a woman was telling us about the town in Northern Ireland where her ancestors came from, a tiny village with not much in it except a church, some houses, and a pope. After a little bit I realized the word she had said was “pub.” : )

Love,
Sam