Elder Sam Christensen

We received the following email and pictures from Sam on Sunday, September 7, 2014. Again, I will preface some of his paragraphs with the questions (in italics) we asked to prompt them.

Subject: Hello all you beautiful people

Date: September 7, 2014 11:54:34 PM MDT

John and Carol Homer are going to Cambodia in a month to pick up Jessa, and they were so kind to offer to deliver a package to you. Is there anything particular you'd like us to send? ok, i will only need about 1 or 2 cool little magic tricks tops. Then a bottle or two of bicycle tire goo would be sublime. But please, not too much stuff. Then some american candies that can transport would be nice. Not much. I'll keep thinking if there's anything that would be good and I'll let you know. I shouldn't need any more drugs or medication things seeing as right now I have enough drugs to open up my own cartel.

How are your shoes holding up, and are you eating well? The Ecco shoes are really really nice. I love them! I haven't had as many opportunities to shine them as I was hoping, though. We bought 20 eggs this morning for this week. We're figuring eggs are a good way to spend the money instead of spending it on peanut butter and stuff. I still buy a lot of bread though, because a loaf of 20 slices costs 1.05. I bought 3 loaves last monday, and I've eaten 53 slices of toast this week. Delicious. Other than that, yeah I'm pretty much more into the Khmae stuff. We eat rice for breakfast and lunch everyday just about. We now have a frying pan and a spatula, so that's much nicer. And I made a little rice pudding a few days ago. I just put the cooked rice in with some milk and sugar and folded it together and it tasted good.

Do Cambodians eat duck, and how is your haircut? I'm not sure if they eat duck, but I would guess they do. They eat just about everything. I did get my hair re-cut last week pretty short, and I thought it looked fine, but all these khmaes were laughing at it and making fun of it all week.

Peter gave Sam a sports update... That's great for BYU. Wow, you'll have to let me know about next week's game. Any Jazz news? Good for that shoemaker guy. He'd been buried in Triple-A for a few years. Looks like he got a chance and made the most of it.

Do you spend much time at the mission office on your P-days? The mission office we just get mail or get reimbursed, say hi to people, get materials, and leave nothing much.

Are some Cambodians relatively wealthy? I really wouldn't know how to compare their wealth because everybody is poor to some extent. I guess there are some people who drive some really nice cars. Idk its confusing. On the roads, the cars are either super super old and run down, or are nice mercedes, lexus cars.

How is the traffic? I realized now that i'm very used to the crazy traffic. Cars whiz by like inches from me, and I literally don't even notice now.

Do many Cambodians speak English? English is apparently still a really hard language for the people here. I'll send some pictures of why..

If you don't understand what people are saying here, you can pretty much get by by just saying "ok"and "very good." Everyone here says OK, but almost no one uses it in the context that normal Americans would use it.

We were fasting starting after saturday's lunch. We went and taught one guy at a little tea/coffee shop that he works at. We'd taught there once before and they brought out iced tea for us and we had to tell them that we can't drink it, or here you say i don't know how to drink it. So when we went back yesterday, they did the same thing and we had to tell them the same thing. But I was thinking about how funny it would have been if they had brought out some ice cold water after having failed with the iced tea, and we'd have to tell them "Yeah, we don't drink that either..."

Last thing for this week: We had a member help teaching a new investigator about tithing. Unfortunately, our member help really screwed everything up when he started saying that how in Cambodia you only have to pay tithing according to your faith, so if you're still a new member you probably only have to pay 2% because your faith is really small still. And how sometimes if you're poor it's better to just keep your tithing money instead of giving it to the ward so they can give it back to you in the form of charity. So he'd screwed up fast offerings and tithing. Scary part of that is that he's our ward clerk. Yikes!

OK, I have more cool stuff I could share, but I've already been here for over 3 hours and have to get on with life. I've got it all written down in my journal. Maybe John and Carol could bring over that other missionary journal that I sent home a while back.

Love and miss you guys!