The first thing i HAVE to say is i found a long lost treasure in one of my suitcases! So waaaay back when i was in Eldoret with the best couples ever, the Pehrsons, they gave us missionaries in Eldoret some cake Sister Pehrson calls 1,2,3 cake. You basically put like 3 scoops of the mix, 2 tablespoons of water, and cook for 1 minute in the microwave. BOOM! IT WORKS!!! And we have had some cake this week in celebration of some hard work and good days! What a blessing the Pehrsons have been in my life and they're legacy lives on! One thing i have come to dislike is people who waste my time. Some people we planned to meet with said that they would come FOR SURE and then never show up. When we try to call them their phone is off....come on guys i did not travel all the way from America to come here and play around. I have a very limited time! Oh well, try to be nice and keep a positive attitude. We have had some miracles and blessings this week. Like honestly this last week has been one of the best weeks! We met with Elias twice and had 2 really great lessons about the restoration with the help of the branch mission leader. He is understanding well about the Restoration and is in the category of a "kingdom builder" which is who we are looking for! We also got 3 referrals for one of my best friends here in Mautuma, Simon. They are 3 of his really good friends who work super close to where we stay and are so so great!! We met on Sunday after church with them and they stay RIGHT NEXT to the chapel! We got another friend there so we had a verrrry powerful lesson about the Restoration with those 4 and Simon helping us. Interestingly enough they all go to different churches but again, they are all in the kingdom builder category. (The kingdom builder category consists of these characteristics. Self-reliant, between ages 18-30, English speakers, potential priesthood holders, have a family) These 4 guys fit all of them except the family part. One is a teacher, one is a medic, one owns a shop, and the other i forgot...BUUT they are all super humble and prepared by the Lord for us! I am super excited about them if you cant tell! On Sunday Barbra also got confirmed and i baptized Baraka! He is such a great boy! I felt so honored to baptize him. We met with the parents and him and really requested that the father baptize him, but he was insistent that i baptize him! What an honor to keep that moment in time together with him. The week has been the best! Mautuma is really booming! We had loots of people there at church and i could notice that we were still missing some people! We have lots of really really great people we are teaching, as well as lots of help from members! The zone also had an incredible week! I think it was the best week for the zone combined in the whole year!! I love being a missionary! Love from ya Bush Man, Elder Merz

Last week we went to Nairobi so that show that we are good and legal to be here in the county. We had to do all this stupid stuff to show we are good to be here, so literally the entire mission went through Nairobi last week. But while there we got pizza one night and we shared stories with Elder Call, Fuller, Segale, Bigirindavyi and I at the Assistants flat. Sleepin on the floor with a little mattress has just become something i am now used to. We also got to go to the mission home and i got to see a lot of my good friends! Such as Elder Bandi who is training someone and STILL in Mombasa!! Lucky guy! I also got to see the missionaries that were going home! My good friends Elder Cox, Cotts, Covarubias, and Elder Egbert! We went to the upperhill chapel and got our papers saying we are okay to be in the country and then Elder Fuller, ncube, Bigirindavyi, Shongwe and I walked to the immigration center in town. We got our stuff sorted out after some hours. Elder Fuller had a problem where on one paper it said 10,000 and the other it said 100,000. So we had to go up to some rooms to figure it out, all they did was just scribble out the 100,000 and write 10,000 hahaha niiiiice. Ncube left to fly to Dar Es Saalem and the rest of us went and got all you can eat pizza from a Pizza Hut there in town. We destroyed the place. The evening we got dinner at the mission home and got to meet the new missionaries more and the trainers. Saturday was a bit rough. We had 3 interviews total for the zone. For the day i biked a total of more than 40 km uphill and the interviews literally took the entire day for us. That is something hard about being in an area soooo far away from others. Barbra was baptized on Sunday! It was a great great day! She was super happy and the service went very well. She is a super smart girl and we gave her a little CTR ring that she wears every day! Randomly during the week i got a smell of like a Nelson summer BBQ....ALSO we are the LAST bush boys left. We are the only missionaries now serving in one of the "bush" areas. Another good week but super busy with unexpected travels to Nairobi. Good thing we got registered though or else they would have deported us or taken us to jail. Hope you all have a great week. I know it must be weird to get an email from me on a Friday, but on Monday we traveled for 5 hours to go and email and the internet places did not really have internet they were just playing around. It took 20 minutes to try to log on and then 20 minutes to just log off. So here we are. Love, Elder Merz Sister Msane got us super nice new blankets!!

On my 2nd to last transfer...its a surreal feeling. Is it really July? Do i really go home in October? I still find myself super excited and not tired of this great work at all. We have starting teaching someone called Samuel. He is the Deputy at a good school here in Mautuma. He is basically the Vice Principle in American terms. He is a smart guy and even quite young to be a VP. He really loves our church and knows its a good church. He was working at another one of the schools here and the church's charity help program thingy build the nicest and best toilets in all the land for that school and he was a teacher at that school. We are excited to start teaching him. On Sunday we are having a baptism of Barbarah. She is a great girl and learns very fast! I have talked about her before, but it is finally her time to get dipped in the water! We are also teaching a part member family and teaching the son, his name is Junior. He is also progressing very well and understanding the lessons. The gospel message is simple, don't think about it too much in depth. I have even heard that if you are struggling just go back to the basic truths! We got to meet with Brother Francis and FINALLY finish helping him with his family history. We sent 10 names to the temple!!! And 33 ordinances total! AND there are more still we can send. We were missing some information but i guess it made him so happy because on Sunday he showed me a sheet of paper full on the front and back of ancestors he found out from his family that he didn't know about and wants to add them. As well as a lot of the missing information. WOW it is incredible!! The last absolutely insane thing i will share is a combination of Saturday and Sunday. So on Saturday we are getting lunch and there is another guy just chillin there. I decide to spark up a conversation. We talked about the World Cup, about our different countries. He told us about his job (He is an accountant). He is a very smart and i am guessing successful accountant just from what he was saying. We then talked a little about the gospel. He is just visiting him home village (Mautuma) but he lives in Mountain View Nairobi. He lives not far from the Mountain View ward and used to go play basketball there a ton, but never attended a service on Sunday. So we invited him to church the next day and he said he would come. HE ACTUALLY CAME!!! That is suuuch a big thing. Lots of people say they will come but don't....but HE did! I sat by him in Sacrament meeting and he was singing the songs that he didn't even know, but was trying! Then in the Gospel Principles class and in Elders Quorum he was participating and asking questions, answering others questions, and saying very intelligent things for not knowing anything but just listening and learning! I wish you could have been there it was truly incredible! Also one of his best childhood friends is a member in Mautuma and they haven't seen each other in over 20 years so it was also a great little reunion for them! Then one of the members was showing the World Cup at his shop and one of the members invited him to come see it with him, AND HE DID!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH wow this man is powerful and ready to receive the biggest blessings in his life from the restored gospel! He is truly prepared and ready for his life to be changed and happiness to be more in his life. We are going to send the Mountain View elders his number so he can receive them! Our week was superb! But sadly my companion Elder Ncube is being transferred! He is going off to Dar Es Saalem. I will really miss him and it has been a short 6 weeks with him, but i have learned things from him! My new companion is Elder Bigirindavyi. I will say more about him next week, but this week.....more not so fun adventures so stay tuned Haha! Loads of love from Obamas fathers home, Elder C. Merz

To start off the wonderful last week we traveled to Eldoret and had a correlation meeting with the District President, President Kogo. We had a good correlation how the branches in Kitale zone are moving forward and how the missionaries are focusing on the right things. Afterwords we went to his home and got joined by ALL the Eldoret missionaries!! Including Elder and Sister Reck, the new couple there, since the best couple Elder and Sister Pehrson went home. Wow his home was full of missionaries and it was such good food and an incredible privilege to have dinner at his home again! I never though i would get that again as a missionary, but he specifically had it that day so that we could join them. I love President Kogo!! After his home we went to this new mall in Eldoret called Rupas. I heard they have some nice deo there, so we went and they were wanting the equivalent of $10 for ONE stick of Old Spice!!! So i got some nice smelling AXE and i found a Snickers so i spoiled myself and got it! For my 4th of July i got to travel 10 hours on a bus to Nairobi....i talked to a lady sitting next to me i could tell does not live i Kenya. So i started talking to her and she is Kenyan but has been living in the us for the past 22 years! She was on her way back right then. She is a minister in another church (wont mention the name). But i was asking her things about what they believed and i got her....she was saying things and ALL i was doing was using scriptures from JUST the bible to ask her questions. She is a nice lady but is lost....i can see how people can be so lost and confused without the additional knowledge of the Restoration and the Book of Mormon. We had MLC and talked about many different things but one that stood out was about mediocrity. We need to rise above doubts, fears, and things that might set us back. "We must use time wisely and forever realize taht the time is always ripe to do right." -Nelson Mandela. "A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things" -Barak Obama. I believe it takes action, determination, faith and consistency to make a change. Lastly i got to go on exchanges with Elder Carlson. We came out on missions together and have become good friends! He is from St. George and is the senior assistant here for our mission. We had a great day working in there area. Good lessons, and we found some great great people who could build up the church! As we were leaving their chapel to go and find some people there was a guy in his 20s with a metal skateboard just outside the gate sitting down!! Elder Carlson and i both know how to skateboard as we skated at home. So we contacted him and he let us ride his board a little bit, do a few tricks, and then we contacted him! He has actually been to the church before so i think God set that up JUST PERFECTLY for us! Have a great week all! I will be enjoying my sleep in MY OWN BED this week! 😉 Love, Elder Merz

So last week on Tuesday when we were traveling back to our area and we were packed 26 of us in a matatu. The road was suuuper muddy because it was raining. There was some stuck cars we passed. Our matatu was super heavy and as we passed them i said in Swahili "Our fatness makes us stong", it made the entire matatu laugh LOL but it was true!! This guy named Brother Chyulu came to Mautuma branch and supplied us with a new printer that also scans and copies, he also got us a new battery pack for when the power goes out, and he fixed the wifi!! Guys like him are so nice, they just come and fix things! This week we called a lot of the people that we got there numbers the week before. From it we got 5 new investigators!! And 4 of them are adult men who have families and speak English, EXACTLY what we are looking for! One of them is named Simon he has some really good potential. We gave him a restoration pamphlet and we met with him the next day and he read the entire pamphlet and had lots of questions and wants to know more about Joseph smith and the book of Mormon!!! We went to the branch presidents house for breakfast one morning. He really loves us, and we love him back too!! He is such a great branch president! Probably the best!!! We then went and visited another member named Euphresia and she gave us some food after the lesson and on there tiny little tv somehow there was WWE. Her mother was soooooo into it hahahaha i was laughing so hard!! She was clapping and making sounds and having the time of her life LOL! After church on Sunday we visited some investigators and then we went to the 1st counselors house and roasted some maize together "This is beautiful" In his own words! It was such a nice time! We talked about the church, his conversion story, family, and just the simple life in Mautuma. Also about the dangerous animals around, like green and black mambas that can kill you between 30-minutes to 3 hours if bitten.... We have a busy week ahead of us but i am really loving the mission and trying to get all i can out of it!! 😄 make sure to keep a smile on your face! it will make you happy and those that see it happy!! 😊 I wish all the best week ever! May happiness be in your life and good vibes come your way! Enjoy the 4th of July for me you beautiful Americans [?] Love, Elder Merz