I hesitate to write this entry fearing to sound cliché. We've been invited to a friend's house the last couple Mondays for FHE. Our friends are a girl and guy cousin both planning to head out on a mission this year. Their families are inactive and it sounds like there is only a mother at home. I should say I haven't always been a big fan of FHE (except for the year that I was the dad) and I probably won't be again when I return to BYU. The lessons are tedious and only tolerable because the games are even worse. Anyway, their house is on the edge of town. You can kind of tell by the sites and smells. There is always something burning anywhere you go in the city. In town I typically inhale melting plastic fumes from smoldering trash piles but moving out it turns more to a campfire setting. The sparsely scattered street lights disappear and wood burning smoke from the back yard flows through trees, past pigs and horses to fill the street. A few families meet at this house. We gather chairs around in a circle and someone leads the lesson. As I was trying to read in the dim light of the single light bulb I realized it hung from a corrugated metal roof which sat on a concrete mason block wall which ran down to the dirt floor my feet were on. A few kitschy decorations (I think Disney princesses or something like that) hung from the wall. The interesting thing wasn't so much the bleakness of the poverty. But that I honestly felt welcome in their energy and friendship. They used the Preach My Gospel manual for the lesson and they all just ate it up. I suppose the cliché here was that I was the one missing something. I left wondering why it was I was spending so much time trying to bring them more wealth. They seemed happy and really loving the gospel and that was more than I could say for me most of the time.