Aug 13th, 2008

Hello Hello Hello,
Well here's another week to share with you. The weather here has been quite strange, we almost drowned yesterday because of how much it was raining, but anyways. . . I have the scariest/funniest experience of my mission to tell you about. Okay, in Battambang, we have a fairly large river running directly through the middle of the city. And this river floods every year, so much so infact that the roads that run parallel to it, have begun falling into the river, very slowly. The road I ride everyday, small pieces of the edge have been falling because the dirt beneath is eroding away, but anyways. Because of this if you would like to kill yourself (sarcasm, just in case you were wondering), you could very easily drive off like a 12 foot drop on your bike or car onto the banks of the river. Well anyways, my new companion Elder Horton. . . he's a little. . . Magoo (for those of you who know who Mr. Magoo is), and what I mean by that is . . . we were riding back from an appointment at it was about 7:00 at night and it was pretty dark. We were riding on this river road. And people, in order to help those who don't know that there is a ten foot drop off from the pavement on this road, have nicely placed car tires every 10 feet or so, all along the road. Elder Horton thought it would be a good idea to try and go on the otherside of one of these warning tires. Needless to say by the time he decided to do this, (seeing as I how i was right next to him, which by the way is the perfect position to see this whole ordeal take place) he hit the ledge with his front tire, and then did a "wheelie" I guess you could call it, except he went too far back and he fell backwards down this ten foot drop! I was absolutely scared out of my mind. I thought he honestly was dead, or a broken back or something. But he turned out alright, he had a few cuts and scrapes, but his backback took the brute hit when he landed directly on a tree trunk (by the way at the bottom of these are all the trees that have fallen over from the earth beneath them eroding away. So that was my awesome story for today. Isnapped some great pictures, for which people were so mad at me for doing, but Elder Horton requested them, so everyone eventually calmed down.
Well as far as the work is going out here, Elder Horton and I are looking to whip this area into shape. We have some awesome investigators and we have recently found some really great news ones that we are excited about. We have one sister who's just about ready for baptism and a young couple who are also both preparing for baptism. I love teaching them. We recently went over saturday morning to help them build their new house. It's made entirely of bamboo and scraps of other various types of wood. It took forever just to put up half a wall, it was really funny, three dumb americans trying to build a house in cambodia, everyone had a fun time letting us know that we knew nothing about construction. hehe.
Well anyways, have a fabulous time whereever you are and take luck.
-Elder Ormsby