Another Month, Another New Year's Celebration - 2/9/19

Dragons at the Chinese New Year festival

My new job - volunteer firefighter/paramedic in Laos

The uncle and his granddaughter (His name is Brother Bounma, btw)

Hey everybody!!

This week's has been a pretty decent one. Life's kinda been slowing down again here with English teaching starting up again. At church we have some pretty solid investigators. They're progressing kinda slowly, but hey I'm not going anywhere so it's fine.

On Monday we visited a YSA member named Brother Khid. He's way cool and has a bunch of family in the church. We've been trying to visit his uncle and his family, because they left the church over a fight right before the church was shut down here, so around 3-4 years ago. The uncle has started to come to church again almost every week, but his family hasn't and we wanted to go visit them. While visiting with Khid he's like, "Oh, I'm gonna go there in like 10 minutes. You guys wanna come?" and we were like, "Uh yeah, we've been trying to meet with him for 3 months.”

So we ran over there and met with the uncle and finally met his wife, son, son's wife, and granddaughter, who all haven't been to church in 4 years. While we were there, a member in the branch presidency called the uncle and found out we were there. He then invited everybody over for a big dinner. So, pretty much miracles on miracles.

We all went over and had a way good dinner with the uncle's entire fam, the branch 1st counselor, and us missionaries. It was way awesome. The uncle and son cried and told us that they want to come back really badly. It turns out that their family is the first family in Laos to ever be sealed together. So that's also way awesome. We were the first elders since the church shut down that reached out to his family and he said that that meant the world to them. Big props to the Branch Counselor for ministering and caring for this family for the entire 4 years that they've been gone.

So yeah, Monday was pretty neat. On Wednesday night we went to a really expensive Japanese all-you-can-eat place with Mino's dad, the really rich nonmember banker. It was cool cause we got to hang out with their family who used to investigate the church in Australia.

On Thursday we went to the Vientiane Rescue place to hand over a bunch of firefighting supplies. That was cool. We talked about us going out with them to help rescue people in ambulances and potentially fighting fires as well, which would be a neat thing to do.

Then on Thursday night we were invited to a huge Chinese New Year celebration. It was wild. They had all kinds of crazy dragon dances, martial arts, and terrifying authentic Chinese food. Very interesting stuff. The dragon dancers were literally insane though. They did some wild stuff.

Welllll, that's pretty much been my week. Pretty fun. 

I hope you all have a great week and a good Valentine's Day!

Shout out to the best dad in the world who turns 40 this week ;).  He's the best role model I've ever had and always inspires me to be better. Love you, Dad!!!

Love and miss you all!

<3

Elder Teacher Paramedic Firefighter Comrade Ridd

;)

Dinner with Mino's family

Me with a goat