Dear Family,
We arrived about midnight in Colombo after almost 30 hours in the air and waiting in airports. Got settled about 2:00am. Ann and her husband, President Anton, picked us up at the airport, had food in our kitchen apartment, took us to church and brought us dinner today. The seem like a young couple but must be older. I think he served a mission in the 80's and they have been unable to have children. He is in the mission presidency and spends many hours helping make the church effort here work. He is working on us obtaining a working visa so we can teach English. We hope to find out this week what university we will be teaching at so depending on our assignment we could move to Kandy or Ngombo.
It is hot and humid, about 88 with high humidity. Our apartment is 2 bedroom, three bath and nice with individual air conditioners in three rooms and fans in four rooms. I will take photos and send them.
The members were over the top friendly and talked about how much they loved the previous couple, Elder and Sister Condie. They made us feel very good. Learning names is what we are working on and I can tell it may be a slow process. It was the Primary Program today and wow!, their singing was amazing. I counted 26 children and it sounded like many more. Tomorrow we go to the grocery store to stock up.
It is 10:20pm here so I am headed to bed. Bill went to sleep about 1 1/2 hours ago.Please know we love you and will keep you updated. We will try to figure out phone connections but everyone her says to use WhatsApp. If we get the magic jack connection to work, we will let you know. We should be able to skype or facetime and hope to set up times that may work for each of you. We realize that things come up so times may change.
I am headed to bed.Love to all.Mom/Becky/Grandma
We arrived about midnight in Colombo after almost 30 hours in the air and waiting in airports. Got settled about 2:00am. Ann and her husband, President Anton, picked us up at the airport, had food in our kitchen apartment, took us to church and brought us dinner today. The seem like a young couple but must be older. I think he served a mission in the 80's and they have been unable to have children. He is in the mission presidency and spends many hours helping make the church effort here work. He is working on us obtaining a working visa so we can teach English. We hope to find out this week what university we will be teaching at so depending on our assignment we could move to Kandy or Ngombo.
It is hot and humid, about 88 with high humidity. Our apartment is 2 bedroom, three bath and nice with individual air conditioners in three rooms and fans in four rooms. I will take photos and send them.
The members were over the top friendly and talked about how much they loved the previous couple, Elder and Sister Condie. They made us feel very good. Learning names is what we are working on and I can tell it may be a slow process. It was the Primary Program today and wow!, their singing was amazing. I counted 26 children and it sounded like many more. Tomorrow we go to the grocery store to stock up.
It is 10:20pm here so I am headed to bed. Bill went to sleep about 1 1/2 hours ago.Please know we love you and will keep you updated. We will try to figure out phone connections but everyone her says to use WhatsApp. If we get the magic jack connection to work, we will let you know. We should be able to skype or facetime and hope to set up times that may work for each of you. We realize that things come up so times may change.
I am headed to bed.Love to all.Mom/Becky/Grandma
Dear Family and Friends,
I hope to send emails to you this way, but if you want off, just tell me and I can delete. Also, I have several emails with no actual names attached, so you could reply and tell me who you are. I included the weslathen group email so someone reply if you were able to get this.
Sister Lathen and I entered the Mission Training Center October 17th. We were to be there for one week, but the last minute things changed. The Church was able to get permission for a missionary couple to teach English at the University as a community service, and we were chosen to do this. It is the first time it has ever been allowed in Sri Lanka, but Mongolia has been doing this for 5 years and the mission there has had great success, as some learners want to know more about the Savior. So, we were selected, but rejected because we had no ESL training. Thus the Church had us take a 40-hour certificate course, half the first week we were there, an online portion, then stay a second week for actual teaching ESL students. I guess we passed and are now allowed to teach ESL to the Sri Lankan university kids. We think and hope it will be team teaching. They may have me also teach an accounting course, which would be a lot easier than ESL.
The day before we left the MTC I had a dream and in it I was told to get the address where we will be staying in Colombo, SriLanka. The next day we emailed the previous Missionary couple who lived here and they gave it to us. We think this was a tender mercy of the Savior, as we had to have this to be permitted to enter the country.
The flight took 30 hours, 22 of which were in the air. Good news is that I got to watch 6 movies, more than I saw the whole year. We arrived in Colombo at midnight and got to bed after 2. We are 11 1/2 hours in the future for those of you in Mountain time. Sunday was wonderful, but we did get really tired at the end. The members have dark skin, very beautiful women and handsome men. they have the warmest smiles we have ever seen. They treated us like we were Apostles or Angels - very humbling but nice. Somehow we need to get to know them and pronounce their names - a huge task. We are praying that we can do this, as their names are mostly different and a much different accent. Please include us in your prayers that we can learn their names.
We hope to visit each family, but even that is difficult as the names we get from them are usually different than from the Branch list of names, and we cannot tell who is who. Hopefully we will learn.
Many of the members have recently been baptized. One family we visited last night only knew broken English, though they could mostly understand us. He is to receive the Priesthood this Sunday, his wife's name is pretty, which means happy. They have two young children. The second family wife is Molly, her son Shashsrika, daughter Metasha. they were baptized just a year ago and Shashsrika is anxious to serve a mission. He reads well, speaks English well and is very good young man. Their husband is a Buddhist who left the family six years ago, was abusive to Molly, but is sending them money to live on as he lives and works in Madagascar.
We love you all.
Elder and Sister Lathen
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