27th Week

Hello Family,

Once again I neglected this email to the last and so I don't know if I have room for everything but I'll try my best.

First on Wednesday, we got to play the "black" market as Elder Jansen calls it. For money here in Suriname the church gives us 315 USD. When we pull it out of the bank ATMS though generally we get a conversion rate at 2.7 or so. That isn't too bad but our senior couple the Jansens discovered that the Cambio's(Free Market money exchangers) will actually give an exchange rate anywhere between 3 to 3.5. So they decided that they'd get us all together, we'd all withdraw our money is USD and then take it to the cambios to see how much we could get from it. It was a wild success and while we normally get 840 SRD this time we got 1057 SRD. Not too bad. The only problem with it is that it took four hours to finally get it all done! That's a lot of time for just 200 more SRD. I don't know if it was worth it but I won't lie I like the extra money.

New Years
So Surinamers take New Years to be pretty serious.. I should have realized that when all the fireworks stores were still open after Christmas. By the way when I say fireworks I don't mean like sparklers I mean the stuff that only firemen/professionals are allowed to have and operate. So what happened is that as missionaries we were required to all be in at 6pm that night in order to protect ourselves. Then the leaders pick us up and when went to the Jansens for dinner and a bit of entertainment before going to the Zone Leaders and watching "Despicable Me" (I really like that one by the way and it is worth a watch if you have time). After that we played games until midnight when we went out to watch the fireworks. Saying this though the rolling thunder that was the fireworks continued to build and build till midnight. At 10pm it was just a constant blur of sound outsides. At midnight the skies were alight with fireworks. There was soo much smoke that you couldn't see down the street. You could only see the brightest points of fireworks in the sky. It was incredible. It literally felt like we were in the middle of a war zone with the sounds and the lights. It was like the USA was practicing on invading Suriname. After the fireworks we played a few more games and finally got asleep at 3am. Only to have to get back up at 6:30am. Might not have been our smartest idea to stay up so late. Oh well what can you do right? :P After that it was a normal work day and away we went. Hopefully that makes a bit of sense I'm not sure if it did. In short, Fireworks crazy, movie good, time with other Elders good too.

Really quick because I'm out of time, can I have you all pray for my paper work to go through this week? My visa expires on the 16th of January and this a bit of paper work problems. I'd rather not be illegal in Suriname if you know what I mean. Prayers would be great.

Gotta Go,

Love you all

Elder Nathan John Nielson