Cow Guts - March 3, 2014

Time is flying by. This week, I was trying to think of an entertaining story and I came up with one! I think it is pretty funny.

About four weeks ago a family (recent converts) invited us over for lunch. They indicated that they wanted to prepare something special for us. We accepted because how often do missionaries get free food? When we arrived at their little shop, we sat down ready to partake of this "Special meal". As we were sat relaxing in their little hut, we were trying to guess what the family was cooking. I could smell the food but I did not recognize the smell. In Uganda they only cook about six different foods so it is pretty easy to guess but this time I had no idea.

As we waited, I started to get a little bit concerned since I didn’t recognize the smell. Tthis probably meant I hadn't eaten it before. I have eaten just about everything a person can get their hands on in Uganda. Some things I ate just once just to say I had tried it. There a few specific foods that I have not eaten because I had crossed them off my list of edible foods.

Those three things are:

1. Cow intestines

2 Chicken feet/heads

3. Cow feet (OK, I already ate this one)

I was sitting there hoping and praying that it wasn't one of those things. We finally heard the scraping of pots. We were ready to discover what was behind Door #1. As Frank brought in the food -- it was cow intestines and rice. I remember looking at the tubes and the chunks of "food" that had hair like tentacles (the tentacles are supposed to push food down the body—and not meant to be eaten in my opinion) on them.

Elder Terry and I just looked at it and laughed with dismay. In Africa if you don't eat what has been prepared, you are not welcome back. It is considered super offensive not to eat. So we both took out our cameras and took videos and photos of our first experience of eating cow intestines. As the camera was rolling, I was laughing because I couldn't believe I was going to eat it. "Mmmh cow intestines!"

Well long story short I ate it all and kept it down! Wahoo! Go team! My ability to keep down unwanted things has improved!!! :)

Now it’s time to talk about the work.

This Sunday was pay day for all the work from the past few weeks!! The week started out searching for people to teach and just a few appointments in a day. As we were searching for people, we would get invited in and try to teach a “personalized” lesson so it would not be repetitive or boring to us or the listener. As the week progressed, we found some great people that seemed promising.

One of the referrals we were given was for a guy named Frank (not the same guy I wrote about above). As we shared with him the gospel, things seemed promising. After the lesson, he committed to come to church and to meet with us again. We were really excited for Sunday. Over the past few weeks the number of investigators at church has really been low. We have tried to do everything that we could think of to increase the number. We really prayed that all would work out and that people would start coming again so that we would have people to teach.

When church finally rolled around, we were really anxious to see if Frank and others would come to church. The Lord blessed us on Sunday. A lot of the people that we had been tracting over the past few weeks (including Frank) all came to church. The investigators at church were awesome and it was such a great feeling to see all of them there.

I’m so grateful to be with Elder Stewart. He is a great guy. I really enjoy Kabowa a lot.

I hope that all is well back home. I love ya all.

Sincerely,

Elder Bitter