On the Mend

   

Getting ready to baptized a guy named Paul. Then building to our right is the meeting house for church.

This was drawn outside of a nursery school. It's just a funky looking picture.

Guess what I learned how to cook!!

Sorry if I scared everyone by telling you I had malaria last week. The good news is, is that I have almost fully recovered. Since Thursday I have been feeling much better and on Saturday I was released back to my area of Seeta and allowed to get back to work. The only effects from malaria that I'm still facing is that by body temperature sometimes becomes hot all of the sudden or cold all of the sudden, and that I get tired much faster. As long as I get adequate sleep at night I can function during the day just fine. Besides that there is no reason to worry.

    This week has been a nice one though. Malaria is not as bad of a disease as I thought that It would be, and once I started getting better (and stopped sleeping my week away) I had a good time with my companion and the other missionaries living in Ntinda. But still it felt wrong not working and teaching. I was glad to be able to go back to my area to teach and bring people to the restored gospel. 

    This week will be transfers so I will keep each one of you updated on what happened next week (weather I'm getting a new companion, or a new area or anything like that).

    Thanks for all of the prayers that have come my way this week. I owe my recovery to each one of you.

-Elder Grilliot

Answers to Dad's Questions:

     1.        How are you feeling now?  Are you back to proselyting?  If they’re still having you rest, when do you think you’ll be back to your area?

2.      Did the doctor say anything about whether this makes you more (or less) susceptible to getting it again during your mission?

3.       Were you taking your malaria pills?

4.      Do you know if this will influence what other areas you may be assigned to for the rest of your mission?  

 Right now I'm doing much better. I'm even Proselyting, but I'm taking it slower than normal. Most of the time I feel like I'm back at full health, but there are still a little bit of side effects that I'm overcoming. Like for instance every now and then my body just go's hay-wire and I'll start feeling supper cold for no reason even if it's really warm out side. Or other times it will be nice and cool out, but I will just start sweating for no reason, and feeling really hot. My body is just trying to adjust back to normal and it's nearly there. 

      Now that I've had malaria my body knows how to fight it much better if the disease comes again (or so the doctor says). So I'm more immune to malaria than I ever have been before.

      To answer if I have been taking my malaria pills the answer is yes. But I do miss a day here or there just out of forgetfulness. I never miss intentionally, but every now and then I will forget to take my malaria pill before going to bed. So that's most likely how I got malaria, I must have missed a dose at some point and it was just enough for the disease to get in.

       Don't worry this won't influence what areas I'm likely to serve in, in the future. As soon as I'm cured of malaria then it's like I never had it (except that I will probably never be able to donate blood or plasma in the future).

      I emailed Grandma Grilliot and let her know that I'm doing completely fine. To be honest Malaria is not an uncommon disease in Uganda. People get it here. And to be honest it really is not so bad, it's not any worse than having a bad flu or something. 

     Keep me updated as the NFL season begins please.

Malaria

      Sorry that I'm emailing a day late this week but this week has been a very upside down one. You see on Friday this week we left our house to go to some appointments. The first appointment that we went to I made it fine but during the middle of the lesson I started feeling really feverish. We walked to the next appointment but I felt really clammy and sluggish and by the time that we had gotten to the next lesson and had finished it my vision had started to go in and out. As we finished the second appointment and stood up I started blacking out, I sat down and told my companion "We need to go home". So we called the mission doctor and he said that we would have to wait until the next day for him to come by and check on me. As we walked what was normally a 20 min walk back home I had to stop and sit down every hundred feet so that I didn't pass out. We ended up making it back home in about an hour. The next day (Saturday) the A.P.s came by and drove me to Kampala where I met the Medical doctor for the mission. He took me to one of the best clinics in all of Uganda (It was created by a wealthy British doctor). While I was there they tested my blood and diagnosed me with malaria. So now I have malaria. I spent the rest of the day on an I.V. and they gave me all these funky drugs to take. I took about 14 pills that day. The next day I went to some church housing in a place near Kampala called Ntinda. That day I took 10 pills. the following day, another 10. When they finally released me from the clinic I felt a lot better but every once in a while I will lay down on my bed and feel like I'm slowly dying. I drink about 3-4 liters of water a day, its the only way to keep the disease down, but I hate having to force all this water down. I also have no appetite either so it's really hard to get food down, but I just have to push it down. I got permission to go out and email today. It felt good to be outside and smell the fresh air, but walking around makes me get a fervor usually and feel extra sick. I feel pretty sick right now but now as bad as I did yesterday. They say that I should be back to full health in about 1-2 weeks. I hope I get get better soon, we were supposed to have two baptisms this weekend, but if I'm not around most of this week, then it will be difficult to get them baptized this weekend. 

     Sorry if I sound like I'm being a downed this week with the whole malaria thing. But the good news is I'm in some of the best hands right now. Dr Johnson (the mission doctor) lives right next door to where I stay and he's keeping very good care of me. His wife feeds me and my companion every night and she really knows how to cook. We are also in one of the best apartments in the whole mission right now and we live right across from the A.P.s, who are very helpful in making sure that I'm doing alright.

     Love you guys, I hope that you all have a great week. 

My Sacrifice for the South Sudanese Family

     This has been a pretty uneventful week. For the most part we just followed up on those who we had meet some time back. The high bros (that's what my companion and I call them) that I wrote about this last week, went up to Gulu to visit family this weekend so they couldn't come to church. We were only able to see them once this week but we taught the Restoration to them this week and we left them with a copy of the Book of Mormon to read. By the time we left they were all fighting over who got to read it first. It was pretty cool.

     Oh I just remembered one cool story from this week. So a few weeks ago I wrote about a South-Sudanese family that we met some time back, well I have kind of a cool story about them. My companion and I were teaching a lesson with some other guys when It started raining supper hard. Honestly it was one of the worst storms that I had seen in a while (there was even hail coming down). But we had an appointment with the South-Sudanese family in about 10 min, and we didn't want to be late. So we finished the appointment and then walked in the pouring rain. the road that we were walking down had pretty much become a river but we traversed it anyway. as we were walking down this road we reached a part were erosion had completely destroyed the road and there was a small lake in the middle of it. But still we pressed on and I jumped the 5ft puddle in the road. Landing soundly on the other side I congratulated myself with an elegant fist pump and began to continue onward. Unfortunately I didn't make it far because the next step I took was into a sink hole carefully hidden in the road, and I fell chest deep into the muddy water. Crawling out of the sink hole I looked like a sad mess of a man, mud in my shoes, mud on my face, mud everywhere. As my companion walked around the sink holes and puddles we decided that so long as we made it this far we might as well just go to the appointment anyways. So I waddled over to the house of the South-Sudanese family. When we finally reached the home, the whole family was so amazed as us for walking through the rain to get to them, and then when they noticed me they were even more impressed at the sacrifices that we had made. I ended up siting on a towel near the entrance to their front door the whole lesson so that I wouldn't dirty up their home, but it still ended up being a really good lesson and I could see that they felt deeply touched that we had sacrificed to go see them. I could tell that by me falling into the mud and sacrificing my own body just to see them, I had left a big impression on them. That Sunday for the first time the whole family came to church as well, and I feel like a large part of what made them come was seeing the sacrifices that we made to see them. "By small and simple things are great things brought to pass" (Alma 27:6).

      Have a great week.

-Elder Grilliot

High on the Gospel

Hello family and friends, It was good to get emails from so many of you guys this week. As a missionary when you get on a computer on Monday and your email account is filled with emails, you just feel so loved.

    My companion and I have been doing really well this week. We have done lots of finding this week and been doing pretty well. We found like 3 families this week. One of them is super wealthy and works in the National Government. He Has a super nice home, like better than most in the States even. I hope that he decides to join the church, He could be a huge help to the church in Uganda.

    Of all the people that we found this week we had kind of an interesting find this week. We were trackting some really nice homes in a far part of Seeta when we knocked on the gate of a pretty nice home. We were welcomed into the home by a young adult (in his early 20's) and he introduced us to his friends. His family had been out of town for the last few weeks, but when we went there he had like five of his young adult friends there. When we walked in to the home they had loud rap music playing, and the house smelled heavilly of weed. Once we sat down we realized that all 6 of these guys in the room were completely high, but we decided to teach them the doctrine of Christ anyway. We had a very powerful lesson, and the spirit was extremely powerful. At the end of it they all accepted to be baptized. We figured that it might have just been because of the drugs though that they accepted to be baptized, but then yesterday each one of them arrived at church at 9:30sharp (30 min before church starts). They were well dressed wearing suites and were reverent the whole meeting. It was as if they all had completely changed. And the best part was what the topic in Sunday School: The Word Of Wisdom. It was a great lesson too. By the end of it all the guys were telling my companion and I how excited they were about getting baptized. I really hope that they understand that it also means getting rid of drugs. 

    Thanks for all of the prayers, I can really feel them working in my life. Continue writing to me if you can. Even if I don't always respond, trust me, I do read them.

Wilbur Force, Sunshine, and the Sudanese Family

     In ten days I will have spent 9 months in Africa, which seems incredible to me. Time has flown by faster than ever before, it seems like just yesterday that I was leaving my family behind in Chicago.

     A lot of things have happened since I left home, but probably the most noticeable is that I have lost a lot of weight. Just about an hour ago I found a scale in Kampala, and for the first time since I left home I weighed myself. I now weigh 98 Kilograms, which for those of you who don't know is about 216 pounds. Since I left on my mission I have lost 49 pounds. To put it in simple terms I have lost about half the body weight of your standard Ugandan male. BOOM!

     My new companion and I are doing really well. I really enjoy training, and I'm learning a lot. My son (that's what I call Elder Sherwood, who I'm training), is awesome. He was born to be a missionary. He is one of the first 18 year old missionaries to enter this mission; he only just graduated high school about a month ago. He's full of energy though and he's been able to help me become a better missionary. Together we were able to find some really cool people, for example these two guys called Wilbur Force, and his brother, Sunday (but we nicknamed him "Sunshine" because he's always wearing a rainbow colored hat). They are super legit guys, and always excited to learn. We found them just by knocking doors, and they let us in right away. From the moment that we gave them the Book of Mormon they just kept on reading. We would ask him to read a chapter, and when we come back they would read four or five. They are just really good guys, and I look forward to seeing them baptized.

     We also found this really cool South Sudanese family. We went to their house while we were just knocking on doors one day and their guard answered the door. So we just walked in and started teaching the guard outside of the family's house. We were teaching him and at some point the book of Mormon came up and he started turning the discussion into a debate. In the end my companion and I just felt like leaving because it seemed to just be going nowhere, so we both shared powerful testimonies and then got ready to leave. As we stood up to get ready to leave we turned around and saw the whole South Sudanese family standing right behind us, turns out that they were listening to us the whole time. They all look deeply moved and looked as though he were going to cry. They told us that they know that we were messengers from God and he begged us to stay and tell them the same things that we were telling their guard. I'm not sure if it was our testimonies or something that we said about the Book of Mormon or the gospel of Jesus Christ, but something that we said to that guard had deeply touched the whole South Sudanese family and made them want to know who we were. We have an appointment with them tomorrow, and It's probably the appointment I'm looking forward to the most this week.

     Love you guys, keep up the missionary work at home and I'll keep it up out here.

-Elder Grilliot

I Have an African Accent!!! & More About Paul

     This week has been an adventure for me. I'm now training a new missionary who's come straight from the MTC. He couldn't go to the one in South Africa though because of some visa problems but he spent his MTC time in Provo Utah, like most people. My son is awesome. He likes to cook, and his food makes me happy. He's very outgoing to and he has jumped straight into the work like he's been a missionary for a lot longer than just a few days. It's kind of funny to see his reaction to all of the new African stuff. It makes me remember how I was 8 months ago when I was trained back in Lira. It also makes me realize all of the small things that has changed about me since I've gotten here (for example my accent).

     This week we have been having lots of success with our current investigators but not much with finding new investigators. We will have a few baptisms in the next few weeks but were having a difficult time finding more new investigators to take their place after they have been confirmed.

      One of the investigators that were really focusing a lot of attention on right now is a guy named Paul. I talked a little bit about him last week but I'll tell you a little bit more about him. He was referred to us by James who was married and baptized a week ago. They were next door neighbors and didn't really know each other all that well at first but one day after we had taught James and left to go to other appointments, Paul came up to James and asked him what it is that we were talking with him about. Then James told him a little bit about us and bore his testimony about the gospel and about the work we are doing. It touched Paul so much that the next time we came by to meet James and Phoebe, Paul came in and sat in the lesson with them and asked us to set up a return appointment with him. He is a very humble guy and I can tell that he recognizes the spirit when it's felt.

     Thank you to all who continually email me and give me so much support. It helps to give me a boost each week to know that there are a lot of people out there who remember and think about me!!

Question from Dad:

 Have you heard any more about missionaries going into Rwanda, South Sudan, or Ethiopia? 

Answer to Dad's email:

     Thanks for the packages, I really do love them but to be honest I think that having some personal money in my account is a little better. It would be nice to have some extra money to have from time to time so that I can buy really good food from super markets or crafts or stuff like that.

      Also I have heard that there are going to be more areas opened up in Ethiopia soon, but I'm not sure about Rwanda. Right now the main problem in Rwanda is that we don't have a Proselyting

  License in Rwanda yet, meaning that the missionaries in Rwanda are not allowed to proselyte  right now. The only way that people can legally teach someone is if they are brought someone as a referral, or if someone comes up to talk to them and asks them who they are. Technically all of the Elders in Rwanda are working there under vacation visas. As soon as the mission there can legally proselyte they will open up Rwanda to at least another 6 missionaries.

I'm Going to be Training

My Companion Elder Thomo, from South Africa, Durbin

This has been an awesome week. My companion and I have worked really hard this week and We have been having lots of success here in Seeta. I also got a call this morning from the mission president, and he told me that I'm going to be training (I'm going to have a son). I think that's super awesome. I don't know much about him except that he's from Washington state. I think that they said his name is Elder Sherwood, but I can't quite remember. Either way I'm pretty excited. Update you guys more on it later.

     We had James and his wife Pheobe (last week I spelled in febe on accident) get married this week. It was kind of cool to see. I had never witnessed a wedding before, but I really liked this one. It was a pretty spiritual experience as well. It was a great baptismal service as well. It was really just a spiritual experience and I really enjoyed it alot.

     James also brought us a new investigator this week as well. It's one of his next door neighbors, Paul. Paul is a good guy (super humble), and he's the tiniest semi-truck driver in the whole world. He's like barely 5 ft but he drives around these giant trucks all over Uganda. He came to church this week and stayed to watch James get baptized. Afterwards he came up to us and told us that he can't wait for his own baptism (YES!), it was a pretty sweet experience.

      Love all of you. I have awesome an awesome family/friends.

P.S.It was nice to hear from Grandma Grilliot in my emails this week. Thank you for the Loving support!

Mommy Questions:

What soap and shampoo do you use?  Do you still have the stuff you brought out there from the states?

When you took that picture back in Lira with the chameleon on your shoulder did you really like it or were you like “Hurry and take the picture so I can get this freaking lizard off me!!!”?

Do you have pictures of your apartment in Seeta?  Is your apartment better or the same as the one in Lira? Electricity blackouts?

I haven’t seen your new companion, do you have pictures? 

When are you going to send an SD card?  We can send you one if you don’t have a replacement?

Is the food the same as what you ate in Seeta?

Are you on bikes or walking?

Does your companion like or want to work out in the mornings with you?

- I have a difficult time remembering faces and names. Whenever I meet someone new and I'm pretty sure I'm going to see them again I write down their name, where they stay, and a small description of what they look like so I remember.

- I'm now using Ugandan Soap that I buy in Kampala (they have decent soap bars there), but I still have about half a bottle of shampoo from home that I cherish and love (and makes me a little homesick).

- I loved the chameleon. I played with him all day. he was supper cool. He was like my 2nd companion.

- I like the apartment that I'm staying in. Power almost never goes out there, and I've never seen water go out. It's easy to clean, and we live right next to the 1st counselor in the branch presidency which is way cool.

- I'll send you a good picture of my companion and I.

- The food is virtually the same as in Lira, just with much more variety.

- No bikes in Kampala (or near Kampala). It's just too dangerous. Right now I'm walking.

- My companion works out, but it's more like just a sit-up here and a sit-up there. I work out hard in the mornings. Jump rope and lift weights.

Dad's Questions:

When people ask you where you're from, what do you tell them? The US? Illinois? Chicago? Bloomington? On my mission, I always told people I was from Chicago – it was just a lot easier than trying to explain Illinois geography. Just wondered what you tell them. Also (sorry, two questions), what do you tell them when they ask you what America is like?

   Good question. Usually I tell them I'm just from America (alot of people don't know American geography very well and if you tell them your from Illinois they won't know what your talking about). Sometimes I tell them I'm from Chicago just because alot of people know that Obama is from there, and it helps them to relate a little.

    When they ask what America is like I tell them it's a hard life. I tell them this because in America if you don't have a job or money, you will starve to death. In Uganda if you don't have a job you can build your own hut and eat mangoes all day. I also tell them this just so that they will hopefully feel more contented with what they have.

     P.S. I took out money this week from home. There was a registration fee on the marriage that James and his wife Phoebe had and I didn't want to make them pay for that. I also bought them lunch after the wedding and rings as well. I'm sorry that I used your money without asking, but I figured it was going for a good cause.