Canadian hoarder story

11/21/17

another awesome week! couldnt be more awesome. getting more familiar with the buses! haha kinda, we still end up walking miles and miles after getting super lost but its always a good time! 

so yeah such an awesome week. wednesday i got to go on exchanges with Elder Ferness one of the Mandarin elders and that was super cool! got to learn some madarin for contacting cause there are SO many chinese people here. it was cool sitting there and pretending like i knew what they were talking about, nodding my head and praying they dont ask me any questions. classic. felt similar when i first started speaking french with africans or the quebecois. but yeah that was awesome! we also met up with this guy that really wanted to feed us and he dug through his pantry and tossed me an old dusty can that looked like those sardine cans with the little turn thing and all that and i was like okay yeah sardines are cool. totally ancient and expired but whatever. but it wasnt sardines and im still not sure what kind of fish it was but it smelled like old dog food and sweaty armpits so that was chill haha. it was mostly just fish guts, like chum. he started digging out more cans for us and i saw a can of beans and was like hey beans are safe and could probably take away from the fish guts taste but the beans were suuper old and so i just kinda looked away and mashed it all together in a bowl and he was like oh you need veggies too so he gave me some spinach and i mashed that in the bowl too and made kinda just a nasty little fish gut bean spinach soup. its probably as good as that sounds haha it was fantastic. finished the whole thing and it was awesome to see how happy he was that he was able to feed us and make us happy. the people here are seriously so amazing and kind. the rest of the exchange was awesome, got to meet up with Dai Wei and some other super cool chinese folks and yeah, awesome experience! 

ah man so we got asked by bishop to see how this one guy Jean Kalisa is doing. recent convert that stopped going to church recently and no one has heard from him in a while. so we found his apartment and man, ah man this place was outstanding. books and garbage stacked to the ceiling on all ends of the apartment. there was literally a path just  shoulderwidth apart in the middle of these mountains of garbage so you could get from the front door to the kitchen or the bedroom. ive never in my life seen anything like it. and when we walked in i noticed the floor was covered in little things like garbage and black things but didnt pay much attention cause yo the garbage on the walls and everything. he cleared out a couch that i never wouldve known was there and let us sit down to talk for a bit. super awesome guy! very smart too, read every single book in his apartment. thousands of books. but as he was talking i looked at his feet and here you always take your shoes off before entering a home so we all have no shoes and i see this fat nasty cockroach crawling up to his foot and he casually just crushes it with his bare feet. nasty like what the heck and then the thought came to me that there probably are like one or two more somewhere in the filthy apartment so i looked down and moved my foot and suddenly hundreds of these fat roaches scurried away under my foot that were EVERYWHERE literally everywhere. i hadnt noticed that the ground was literally covered in roaches. ah man i was dying that whole visit haha i had to keep moving my feet cause they would swarm and start to crawl on them if i sat still and ah man. all over the couch we were sitting on and on our shoes. i cant even exaggerate how many roaches were in this guy's apartment. i crushed so many while walking out to the door, haha we both glanced at the bottom of our socks before putting our shoes on and i almost starting gagging haha ah i hate roaches. we had chills for the rest of the day. sick nasty roaches hate them so much we hate them.

ah man saturday was too awesome. so our ward has a ton of asians and latinos so saturday night we had a "latino night" with a ton of latino food and a pinata and all this latino music and all that and it was so fun. haha all these old latino ladies wanted to teach me to dance so i let them and this one lady got so excited and taught me all the dances for all the different kinds of songs and according to all these old latino ladies im a natural and this lady took me around to the younger latino women and pointed out which ones i should consider marrying haha and she was like you WILL marry a latino, you were MADE to marry a latino. haha too much fun. i became a pro dancer and apparently that is what will get me a wife. and we had special permission to dance with the latinos so no rules were broken dont worry. but yeah such a fun night. we got home and elder carter and i couldnt stop dancing. love latinos.

Elder Renlund came to our mission! woke up at four in the morning and took a bus to montreal with all the other missionaries and ah what in incredible experience that was. first thing he went over was he wanted to thank us, and he went on just giving us thanks for serving and everything and ah how cool that was. and then he went on to describe how we were all called here for a reason and went over the process on how missionaries are called and all that and shared lots of super awesome messages with us. what an amazing opportunity to hear from an apostle of the Lord! 

sunday i got to introduce myself to the ward from the pulpit and it i shared how excited i was to be here and my decision to go on a mission and how much ive been loving the snow and four times from the pulpit i was shot down for being excited about the snow. everyone hates the snow here haha. its seriously so much fun. but apparently its still not even actually "cold" yet so we'll see. i love it. haha and in the closing prayer this super sweet lady gave me a massive shoutout as "elder hollaway" which EVERYONE thinks is my name here for some reason. even in quebec people would read my tag and say halloway. so yeah. elder hollaway it is i guess. haha after i went up and bore my testimony these old asian ladies came up and all said im a cowboy haha apparently from the way i walk and talk and i guess i just look like a cowboy. sooo yeah, halloway the cowboy or something..

so yeah everything here has been so awesome! we've got tons of work to do with our investigators and hometeaching and the four hundred people that arent coming to church and i LOVE it!! ah we're slammed every day with so much to do and i love it. learning so much more every day!!! also apparently thanksgiving is coming up over there! so i hope you all know how grateful i am for you!! for helping me become who i am and for helping me have this desire to work hard and serve the Lord! and im so grateful for my family more than anything. love you all so much!!! 

-Elder Halloway

my face kinda froze like this after walking miles in the direction of the wind 

we walked for forever waiting for our street and realized we went the totally wrong way so yeah gotta collapse in the snow

i still dont get it halloway what the heck