Best Funeral for Them . . . Worst for Me

June 10, 2019 

So, funerals here are Nothing like home. Like, imagine a high school dance with 8 more speakers, food, all ages, and for 24 hours straight and that is a funeral here! An old man died who lived across the street and so for most of the week they were setting up these huge tents in the street. About a day before the funeral they brought in these 2 cows and then killed them on the corner and about 7 pm the next night the funeral started. They brought in tons of chairs and hundreds of people came. They started up the live band and the drums and connected them up to about 7 jumbo speakers and started! About 10 at night we watched from the roof and were thinking, ok, this is pretty cool. Noisy African music, cool dancing, just something we don't see every day. Then it was midnight...then it was 1 am, 2 am and they didn't stop there. They were playing live music and were dancing until 5 am! And after 5 am they kept playing music on the speakers. Then about 10 am they started up the band again and were playing until 5 pm that night!! Worst. Night. Of. My. Life. Can't honestly say I slept a full hour. I tried everything to block out the noise. sleeping on the roof, shutting windows, even playing softer music to try to drown out their music/women screaming at the top of their lungs! Nothing could drown it out! Its gonna take a while to forgive the neighbors for that one... ;)

The funeral sacrificial cow. RIP big guy 😢

Me and my companion had a great week this week and were able to find a bunch of amis we weren't expecting! We fixed a date finally with a couple for next week who have been waiting to get baptized forever because they didn't feel ready but finally after praying decided this was a good thing. We also got a call from our recent convert who got baptized last week telling us to come to the clinic quick and that he had cut his foot with a machete while working in his corn field! So, we hurried over there, and it was bad. He had cut 2 tendons and (I think) definitely should have gone to an actual hospital to get surgery but the doctor there said that he had dug around and found the tendons and sewed them back together so it should work now. I sure hope it is as simple as that and he will heal well considering he just sewed this all up on a medical examination table! 

 The best white baby painting that happens to look like a 14 year old boy in a diaper :')

Funny thing that happened today is a was upstairs sweeping and I looked out the window and I see this boy look up at me, pick up a rock, and huck it at our house!! So, I yelled at him, asking him what he was doing and he yelled back "GIVE ME 50 FRANCS!" then ran off before I could "give him his 50 francs" 😂 

Love y'all!

Elder Briggs

 Trap fr. Maurice uses to catch monster rats! (same guy who cut his foot the next day)

Maurices foot after it's sewed up!

 His sketchy operating room