Just another week in good ol Dondo

Alright to start I have a theoretical question.... what happens when you send Hungry teenage boys to a far off country and teach them how to cook and buy their own food? Ill give you a small answer... they eat... and they eat A LOT.   hahaha we have made such good food here and for my birthday yesterday we made some vanilla cupcakes that were dang good but I fear that I will be putting on some serious pounds here soon because we eat sooo much... and like 5 bananas every day... haha...

But this week has been super good. It has been good... in a hard way.. haha we were sitting down with this family to teach the boy of this mother who is a member of the church and I was bearing my testimony and all of a sudden he starting laughing at my portuguese so hard and just got up and left..... so yeah that was a little discouraging but hey there's not much more I can do. I am trying so hard to learn the language... it's hard but always good.

Right now it is kind of hard because our house doesn't have clean water so we are trying to work around that especially with how much we have to walk every day it is super hard. But I love the mission. Despite all the hard things and the discouragement the spirit out here is so strong. You can feel how the spirit is touching the lives of people here every day. The work is progressing and coming so fast. We are teaching a guy named Matias right now and he is progressing so well.

 I don't have a ton of time today but I was asked about what my days are usually like so I'll give you a quick picture. So we usually wake up between 5 and 630 in the morning depending on if we have to catch a chappa to get someplace far away and then we start to do some super awesome workouts with some ghetto weights made out of concrete that previous missionaries made. haha then we usually eat an egg or something like that and we start our personal studies and things like that. Then we go out around 11 to contact people and try to set up more lessons and then we eat... and boy do we eat. Hahaha for my birthday we had something called sweet chili Raspberry chicken with rice.... yeah it sounds totally nasty but it was probably the best thing I have eaten here. then we do some more studies and finally we leave for the field. In mozambique because your area is so far away from your house we aren't given time to eat dinner so we are in the field usually from 3 until 9 just walking around and preaching the gospel.

Dondo is interesting. All of the houses are about the size of a bedroom made out of tin and concrete and we are in a semi dense forest with mango trees... which at first sounds super dope but with mango trees comes mango spiders which happen to be MASSIVE SPIDERS so thats awesome. Sorry for the super short lame email but just know I appreciate all the prayers and thoughts of everyone reading this. At times the mission is so discouraging but in the end when I go to sleep I always know that I am doing exactly what God wants me to be doing which is such a good feeling.

Elder Thornton

​Also a Shout out to my brother Greg for his shoe shining kit that has come in clutch