Dear Elder Battraw: 20 July 2015

This week started off in a very exciting way: burning ties. One of the (as far as I can tell) worldwide missionary traditions is burning a tie at your 6 month mark, a shirt at your year mark, pants at your 18 month mark, and a suit coat before you go home. This was probably the first and last thing I'm going to burn, but it was fun while it lasted. To celebrate, we went up to the roof of our apartment complex, and tried to get the ties to catch fire. That ended up being a lot harder than I thought. I had got 400 matches, so it theoretically would have been easy. Nope! Partly because of the wind, and partly because I had gotten really cheap matches, it took nearly all of them before the ties caught. I had just bought the tie I burned off of a companion, so I still have all my original ties. It was a lot of fun in the end, because once the ties caught, they burned for a while.

The next day, I finally busted one of my longstanding barriers: 4 plates of rice! The members here always will try to fit as much rice down your throat as is humanly possible, and this time I managed it! The member was thrilled.

On Saturday, we had a day of caution. It was the first day of Ramzan, or Ramadan, and so we were told to be very careful in who we talked to and how late we were out, because the celebration may get out of hand. In reality, nothing really happened. I wouldn't have guessed that it was Ramadan if I hadn't been told. Pushkaral, on the other hand, is being absolutely insane. In one day, 5,000,000 people showed up. That was twice the number that anyone expected, all in one day. This particular type of Pushkaral only happens once every 144 years, and so it was a little bigger than people guessed, what with India's population growing in the last 144 years.

We found three new interesting investigators this week. The first was the son of a late evangelical christian preacher, and was very excited to meet us. We ran into him on accident, and he invited us in, and we had a very long gospel discussion. His church, the church of Christ, has very similar beliefs to us, but he doesn't trust the old testament, priesthood, or revelation. We plan on coming back, because he may be promising. The next two we found were also on accident, and also while looking for someone else. They go to the church of Jesus Christ of Nazareth's Ministry, and once again have very similar beliefs. We taught about the plan of salvation, and they got very excited about it, and invited us back!

These are some of the Pushkaral decorations

This is pourri, an indian breakfast food. It's a little like a fried pancake, full of air

Elder Stephen was quite a character. He talks back too much.

Not my arm, by the way- Elder Willis did the honors.

There are a few others, the zone leaders, but they weren't there at the picture fest. So, this is who was.

This is the field behind our apartment. It used to be an apartment complex, but one too many Mormons lived there. Just kidding, it's a dump where someone was burning trash.