*Sorry for the delay in updating Jamin's blog! In January I had the wonderful opportunity of driving with "Sister Grandma" (aka Larry's mom) to her new mission in Columbia South Carolina, but our planned 4 day drive took a week due to the severe snowstorm in the south! 2 days after coming home I was asked to chair the food committee for the stake Women's Conference to be held February 12 (yeah! it is done and was successful!), so those of you that know what that is like will understand why I haven't been accessing his blog!
Enjoy catching up!

January 3, 2011
This week has been some what difficult, ha, with all the new years stuff! With the people in Togo Christmas is not so much of a big holiday-its only for the children- but new years is HUGE!! They partied all day on Thursday, Friday and then again all day on Saturday. So we had all the baptisms lined up for the 1st and then only one of our people show up on Saturday for the baptisms, and there was no one that came and assisted the baptism either so it was just a little let down. So we will find out what will happen to the mission soon!
This week I have seen lots and lots of drunk people and the roads and restaurants are filled with people and when the missionaries walk down the road and the people see the white missionaries everyone seems to lose intelligence and ask for money or like to pull on their arms or touch them so we have to take taxis everywhere to keep them safe. And then still when people hear that I am a black American,they always say 'wow its my first time of seeing one' and then they just stare at me like I am some rare animal or something; it's really awkward and I don’t know how to respond to that so I say 'thank you' and then walk off.
Oh and wow for new years we stayed up until midnight and opened the new year and once it struck midnight the night lit all up with fireworks! It was crazy because everyone here can buy roman candles and all those big huge fireworks and they are inexpensive so everyone buys them and the lights just lit up and it was so loud and the skies were all smoky after because there were so many! And everyone was dancing and celebrating. It was good to see everyone have a good time!




January 10, 2011
So today is the big voodoo holiday which will be exciting, I watched a lady this morning as she was painting art on herself for the holiday and I see people having tattoos on their bodies of the names of all the voodoo gods and I saw a big wall with all the names written on it and the houses with the voodoo flags on them blowing in the wind its very interesting.

Well its kinda of been the same here just going out everyday and spreading the word, ha there is actually an anti-mormon dvd going around here and so now we are going to put out a counter dvd for everyone to see and we will then teach them all about the church, it will be pretty awesome; I love teaching large groups of people here and hearing the random questions that they have! And the members are great here, they always give us contacts. It is very very hot here but there is a cold wind that blows in which makes it dry and hot, but cool at the same time; its one of the seasons here, and there is dust everywhere! So with all the dust at night its like fog so you have to watch out for all of the motorcycles so that they don’t hit you!

So pretty soon I think by the end of the month we will be starting up all the new branches with the missionaries, so then we will have to the the branch presidents of them, which will most definitely be different but I'm excited!

January 17, 2011
Hey everyone this week has been pretty good, we had President Ayokoue come to Togo this week and teach us on some new missionary tactics. My companion and I had baptized the most in Togo but I don’t know yet for the mission I will find out in the next news letter! So this week has been filled with lots of cleaning for President, and then being taught all week! But President got called back to Cote d'Ivoire because there was alot of activity that happened over there so he had to go back there immediately! This week we baptized one-person which was great because with President being here we didn’t have anytime to teach, ha!
We all got to talk to the member of the 70 who is over West Africa which was really cool; there have been a lot of big leaders over here this week because we will be starting up this mission and with the new missionaries coming in the beginning of February there will be a lot of changes going on, we will see what happens to the district and I!! For this week the members have given us so many people to teach so it should be a week with lots of stories!! And the members always come up and ask for ideas to run things here; its really great because I get to see how the church will grow in this country; it’s a great blessing indeed.

January 24, 2011
So there is a main road here that everyone goes on to get to the more civilized places and it turns out they decided to do construction work on that road and close the whole road because there are a lot of massive palm trees in the road so no one can pass except for the people on their bicycles. So there is only one more back road and everyone was trying to get on it(this story takes place during the night time), so we take a taxi and we are on this really steep hill and traffic is just terrible, especially because it is African traffic and everyone is on motos, too, so all the motos make everything worse. So we are on the hill and we move about 2 feet at a time and this man's taxi is an automatic and it sounded so bad and I just knew his car was going to die on this hill and right at the top of it his car dies! By this time we have people getting out of their cars and trying to direct traffic and now everyone is stopped because the people really don’t know how to direct traffic and so now we have to get out of the car and walk through all of the traffic and try to catch a taxi on the other side! Then everyone is crazy and we have to stiff arm motos so that we don’t get hit because the Africans would just run you over! It was actually really fun dodging motos and stopping them and then eventually we got a taxi and went home! Oh and we made s'mores this week too; its really interesting the chocolate here is a lot better than the chocolate in America!

*So fun for me as his mom, to read the strong missionary stories mixed in with the typical young man tales of having fun dodging motos!

February 14, 2011
*Jamin's email did not come thru last week because of problems with the site, so we got two today!
This week (2/7)we have received 2 new missionaries here in Togo! It has been really fun again this week, getting the work done and teaching everyone. We got another baptism this week, he is a really awesome guy but he is really, really weird also! Oh boy, he has an awesome testimony but he is probably one of the weirdest people I have met on my mission! When we baptized him it took 9 trys to get him under but he eventually got under and he was so happy he was smiling the whole time during his baptismal ceremony! That’s the best thing to see, we were all very well pleased!!But also we have had to go around to a lot of our less active and non active members and talk to them this week, so its been fun coming up with all these different ways to get them going to church again.
This week (2/14)has been another normal awesome week, nothing really out of the normal happened this week ! And we didn’t get a baptism this week; we were pretty upset because we broke our streak since we have been baptizing every week since the 2nd to last week in December and our mission president just called us this week to tell us how very pleased with us because we were the only ones to be able to do that; WE GOT JINXED!! We will most definitely get the wheels rolling, we have quite a few investigators now. We have been getting at our members a bit this week, we have been trying to perfect them so that they can become a ward faster; our ward is a power house and they are amazing! That is why we are seeing lots of success-it all starts with the members! Oh and mom,that motivational message that you sent, I loved that one! It was really awesome, Thank you!!

*I send a 'thought for the week' at the end of my emails, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, always hopefully encouraging! Here is the one Jamin was referring to.

Thought for the week: A motivational speaker for the NFL told about how hard it is to motivate people who are already at the top of their game...what do you use to motivate someone who already makes lots of money, has received many awards and all the accolades from people who look up to them? He decided to teach them to always have high expectations for themselves regardless of outside rewards. He placed a stick 12 inches above the ground and asked one of the players if he could jump over the stick. The player swaggered up to the stick, acting all silly, and barely hopped over it. The motivational speaker then asked him why he hadn't jumped higher over the stick, knowing the player could easily have jumped at least 4 feet in the air, and the player responded that he didn't need to put out that much effort when the stick was placed so low. The speaker then told him, and all the other players, that they should always give their best effort regardless of how low the expectation is, because they know they are capable of doing more and anything less is unworthy of the men that they want to be.