Elder Bunga's Birthday and chicken Biryani

Dear everyone!

Hi! How is everyone doing? Life here is great! This week was pretty average. We were able to teach a lot of lessons so that was awesome. But we had a lot of members telling us about the problems in the branch and its super frustrating. Everyone here likes to gossip about each other including the missionaries so its causing a lot of problems for the work to prosgress. We met with the Branch President who is awesome by the way and on Sunday he scolded the branch like anything it was awesome. But he also said some things that might get us in trouble. We were worried about it because Heavenly Father will not bless the Branch with new members if they arent taking care of the ones they already have. Anyway. Other than that everything is going super well. We have 4 investigators with a baptism date and 11 at Sacrament meeting. So the work is definitely moving on and we are hoping to be able to baptize these people in March. Satyanarayana is so awesome. He always wants to learn more and he scolds any pastor that tells him our church isnt true. That’s one big problem here is the members of other churches watch what houses we go to and then send their pastor to talk to our investigators. Its times like those when my Christ-like attributes are tested! 

Funny miracle that happened. So we were having some workers at our apartment to fix the broken a/c and I guess in one of the bedrooms the inside door handle was broken and we went inside and turned on the a/c to test it. so I shut the door and then I realized there was no handle on it so we were trapped there! and the front door was locked so the other elders couldnt get in to save us. So we came to the conclusion to break the door. I dont really know how to describe this but here it goes...So in the bathroom there are two doors.. one to the bedroom and one to the front room. each door is locked from the outside so we went into the bathroom and I basically just kept pulling the handle until it would break... and finally it opened but when we looked at the lock and we got out it was fine.. like it was unlocked from the outside.. so we are pretty sure an Angel is in our apartment to help us when we do stupid things and lock ourselves inside the door. I hope you understood that.. I dont know how to describe it but it was wild. Moral of the story.. The church is true.

This week was Elder Bunga's Birthday so we enjoyed nicely and went to a non-veg buffet which means all the curries are different types of meat. I had chicken biryani and cried cuz it was so good. Ohhhhh its so nice to be back in Andra Pradesh. best food. Our zone is doing really well and they are working hard. Yesterday the sisters had a couple of baptisms so that was awesome. So all transportation is by auto and walking we dont have any cycles or cars. There are Rats and every gross bug known to man running around. I dont see as many cows and dogs as I saw in Rajahmundry. But they are around.Yaaa What else. I dont know. Thats it. Missionary life. Love you all!

Elder Checketts