Feb. 21, 2011 letter

Dear Family,

This week has been about the same as last week.  But we did find a new lady to teach.  It will be hard though to get her to church because she goes out of town every weekend to buy clothes for her store.  We helped a newer family have their first FHE.  I remembered an activity that our family did a long time ago.  We made boats out of foil and put pennies in them.  I decided to do the same activity with this family, and then tied it into Nephi's boat and the instructions that he followed.  We went to a small village this week to find some less actives.  We talked to a family that had about 100 chickens running arround their yard.  We tried to find 2 other people but they weren't there.  Then we visited with a very active family and helped them plant a palm tree.   While we were planting it, an entire herd of about 60 sheep ran down the street to their pen.  The family bought us coconut ice cream.  It was really good, and it costs about 60 cents for a cone.  I'll have to buy more of that if we go back.  We got some really good meals from members this week.  The branch president's wife made us really good fried chicken and the next day a different family made us huge fried shrimp.  We had a fun experience with rats this week.  A rat had eaten through a screen, got into the kitchen, and ate some of my companion's oatmeal and some of his soap in the bathroom.  We thought it had left so we shut the window.  The next night we woke up to something moving around in the kitchen.  We turned on the light and saw a rat trying to get out the way it came in, but it couldn't because we had shut the window.  We opened the window and the rat went out.  We shut it again so we wouldn't have anymore rats.  The next day and the day after I noticed that there were teeth marks in my soap and there were some droppings on an issue of the Liahona.  We bought some sticky traps from the store and laid them out.  Last night while we were studying we heard the noise of a rat running arround stuck to the trap.  It ran under the fridge, managed to free itself, and then started trying to escape.  It jumped on my companion’s suitcase, jumped to the refrigerator cord, fell, tried it again, got to the window, and jumped back down because it was shut.  We opened the window, and it did the same thing and got out.  I don't think we'll have any more rat problems.  I'll probably be emailing later in the day for the next few weeks because we leave earlier for our district meetings, so we email after we travel.  Say hello to the cat and all of the animals for me.

Love,

Elder Gubler