Junior Primary, Visiting Professor, Thanksgiving Chicken, Lucky the Cat and a Bus Ride

This is a picture of our Junior Primary classes (Sunday School for you non-Mormons). They are coloring pictures and being helped by Sister Pratima, the second councilor in the primary presidency, who is supervising. Lear is the first counselor.

This is a picture of us, the Oliphants (our companion missionary couple) and the Steve Thygerson family. Steve is a professor in the Health Sciences Dept. at BYU. He was in Nepal for a couple of months teaching at a Nepali university. He brought his family along and they had a great cultural experience. They saw the biggest spiders and met nicest people in the world. There are probably bigger spiders but no people are nicer than the Nepali. A lot of people from the USA visit Nepal so we see a lot of Americans.

You can't get a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner so we made do with three baked chickens. Our landlord and an expat named Rose prepared the chickens. They live upstairs from our apartments.

This is a picture of our Thanksgiving feast.

This is a picture of Rose's cat named Lucky. Lucky is lying on a table basking in the sun. He is the fattest and biggest house cat we have ever seen. He must weigh 35 pounds. When a visiting Nepali asked our landlord why Lucky was so fat our landlord replied that Lucky was an American cat. That satisfied the man who had inquired about Lucky. The man simply nodded his head and said that he understood. You see in Nepal and throughout the less developed world Americans are often viewed as over weight, far to affluent and usually self indulgent. They are probably correct in this view of us.

Elder Joe Oliphant and I have been using public transportation when practical. Pictured here is a public bus that is actually owned and operated by a private individual but licensed by the government. You pay about 30 rupees (that is about 30 cents) for a two to five mile ride across town. Joe has a PhD and is a retired chemical engineer. He is a good fit for Nepal since he designed and built chemical plants around the world.

A picture from the back of the bus.