June 20 The GREAT Matero District

Last week I had said that this week would be our last full week of proselyting before the Mission President Transition, but never mind! We were pretty busy this week! President decided it would be best for us to meet this week in order to have more time before President Kupu comes, so we met and discussed what's called the transition checklist for the new mission president then President wanted us to know where his flat is so he drove us there and also showed us the American International School that Pres Kupu's son will attend. It was awesome to spend informal time with President. I learned a lot just from our conversations along the way.  I'm sure we will have some more transition business this week as well since it's President's LAST week!

This week we also did some more maize shucking for a family in the ward, the Bandas. (Although I love this family so much, I suppose it's almost a waste to write their name here or in my journal because it will be so difficult to remember who I am talking about since the most common name in Zambia (and Malawi I think) is Banda! Thank goodness for pictures though!) Our district has grown recently with the addition of the Lilanda elders, Elder Day and Elder Komakech, so now we are a district of 6 elders. It makes transportation difficult though since I can only drive 3 missionaries in the back of our truck, so the Groesbecks also help us with transportation for the other elders and its such a joy to have them around as well!

In total we shucked about 200kg of maize kernels

On Saturday the ward had a primary activity and they enlisted us to help out! It was so fun. The kids are so fun and probably haven't experienced activities like this in the past! I don't know what they (or we!) enjoyed more though, the games or stuffing their mouths with as many PB&J sandwiches as they wanted!

Our work in the area is still going very well. Hope and Sembe are sooo excited for their baptisms next week! As a district we should baptize 8 people in total! 

Today was a fun day too. We had a district activity and went to some place called Eureka where they just have wild animals roaming around like zebras, giraffes, antelope, and a super friendly dog ha! Check out some of the photos to see how close we got to the zebras. The giraffes were a bit more skittish though.. and the antelope don't allow you to get close at all! We were leaving and saw that the baby elephant orphanage was close by and they would be feeding the elephants soon so we went over and got to see them chug their milk and play around for a bit. It was a really nice activity! Then we finished it off with Zambian Kentucky Fried Chicken. Oh and I was the chauffeur for the day so I got to drive our nice big mission van! It's an automatic so that was a little weird for me..subconsciously you want to push the clutch or move the stick.

Love you all
Elder Grant Hiltbrand

So the police are just going bezerk over here... today I got pulled over for the light turning yellow whilst in the middle of the intersection ha...I was even driving our mission van with the office couple in the car so they also knew I did no wrong, but it's just one example of how crazy they've been. I didn't get a ticket today, I talked her out of it and she probably felt guilty after seeing my badge

Our vehicle coordinator went in to register my previous truck again and they couldn't because there was a ticket, so he went and just admitted guilt to the ticket and paid and then came back and found out it was me who was driving! They didn't pull me over or anything and I checked the date of the ticket and I know exactly when it was. I got a ticket because I didn't allow a mini bus to ILLEGALLY merge! It's just so biased here... and the ticket was 450 kwacha ($45)... usually tickets NEVER exceed 300k or 150k.  I called the police and they said that that isn't even allowed to just write up a ticket.