Tuesday, December 10, 2019

And Warbler in a Short Bush (Cubby letter 11/24/2019)

Once upon on a time, there was a land where it never rained. The end.

Mauri
It was a good week, another week of us being in a trio. We live in London because our house in Banana is too small to accommodate 3 people. The new sisters came, one from Tonga, one from Fiji, and one from Kiribati. So maybe I'll be able to speak in Divers tongues by the end of this transfer. 

Tuesday November 19
We worked in Banana today. We had an early lesson, but Nobody was there, so we went to a place called Bwatua to talk to people. So a weird thing about Kiribati, every religion has what they call a "wall." That basically consists of the place they go to church, generally a mwaneaba, and a bunch of houses around it. A lot of time the people that live in these houses don't really have a calling/office/job in their church, they are just really determined not to talk to anyone not of their faith ever again. At least that's what it seems to me. Anyway, this place called Bwatua has the Catholic wall inside of it. So the people that live there are really into Catholicism. But we go there a lot anyway, and sometimes people give us funny looks because of it. Anyway, we only had 2 lessons that actually happened, one was a Plan of Salvation lesson for the daughter of one of our investigators, and the other a first time meeting with a new person. To end the day, we had dinner in Tabwakea, it was a good bye botaki for Sister Manu. During the botaki, I got a call from President Foster trying to talk to me about something about the new sister's house. But since he was in Marshalls, it kept cutting out, so the only thing I heard was that we needed to do an inventory. So at 9 oclock at night we did an inventory of their house. And we tried to contact President again via Face Book Messenger, but he never responded. So we got home at like 10:40

Wednesday November 20
We woke up at 5 am today to go pick up the new sisters that are working here. There is always a lot of interesting people at the airport, so it's fun to go there. One of the people who got off the plane was this very old white dude, who looked very confused. I went over an talked to him and he said that he was a doctor here for work, and nobody was there to pick him up. So I tried to help him a little bit. We didn't have the hospital's number (typing that out makes me realize that we should probably get it) so I went and talked to a random I-Kiribati dude and asked him if they had the Hospital's number. He asked why, and I told him it was because this old white dude is a doctor and nobody was here to pick him up. Which is funny because the doctor had just told the same guy that in English and the I-Kiribati dude pretended to understand. But once I talked to him he went and talked to the guy that was supposed to pick up the doctor, and everything was solved. Anyway, we dropped the sisters off in their house, and went to our 8 am lesson. We came back after that only to have the sisters inform us that they only had 1 bed. So we went on a bed hunt. Luckily, I don't spend that much money so I had more than enough to buy one. Well not like a real mattress, but 2 foam pads at 70 Australian notes each. We returned to the Tabwakea chapel to have district council, but we took the new sisters to shop for food instead, because they had none. So after that we took Sister Manu to the airport to so she could leave. It was pretty entertaining because the KUC minister (I think they are technically Lutheran, but they don't know that lol) was leaving after the standard 4 years. When it was time for check in they actually rolled a red cloth in front of him to walk on. I aspire to achieve that kind of clout. So after that we took Sister Manu's companions home, and begun teaching lessons. The first one fell through, and we decided to study at that point, because we hadn't yet. The next lesson fell through, and we had a good lesson on 2 Nephi 32. We had dinner in London, yet another botaki, this time for a missionary who just returned.

Thursday November 21
We woke up today and Elder Bartley was sick. So we kind of just sat around the house. Elder Baker cleaned a bit, I would've helped but there was only one broom, and I'm lazy. We gave this one YSA lunch because he came to our house. So it was good to get the language juices flowing. At around 2 or 3, Elder Bartley woke up, and shortly thereafter we were working again. We had 3 lessons, in which we were late to all of them. The last one was on the temple. All the lessons were a little disorganized because we didn't plan, thanks to the illness early in the day. We had dinner with this dude who went to The Dominican Republic on his mission and his family. Since he speaks Spanish, he made friends with this cook dude on one of the cargo ships, so he was gifted a bunch of "meat" which appeared to me to be steak. So we had that for dinner.

Saturday November 23
Pretty average start to the day, exercise, studies. I studied from some old general conference talks, my favorite being one back in 1985 by Russell M. Nelson called Self-Mastery. He gave some good insights on some commandments and the influence they have on self control. The one I had never thought about before was the Law of Tithing. He said something along the lines that if we have the self control to pay our tithing, then if some opportunity comes up to steal something or cheat someone, we'll have the self control to not do it. Anyways, we had a lesson planned for 10 am in Tabwakea, but they weren't there. So we headed up to Banana. We spent awhile tracking down people we already knew and scheduling times with them. We ended up teaching a couple lessons. We taught a pretty good first lesson to one of our newer people. Anyways we had dinner at a birthday party, so we got cake amd ice cream. But since we're in Kiritimati, it was American ice cream, and cake from a mix. Actually the other day we ate some Fijian ice cream that was passion fruit flavored, and it was really good.

Sunday November 24
Shook things up a little but today by spending the day in London. We went to church in London as well. Everyone in the branch was surprised to see me again, and I think some members that don't come very often didn't realize that I'd ever left at all. But church was good, a girl gave her home coming talk, she served in Kiribati, so I actually knew her a little bit. She didn't speak very loudly though, so not a lot of it was heard by me. An old lady spoke on service, which was pretty neat. The toilet for the chapel was broken, so church policy required us to end church after sacrament meeting. The day went alright after that. We spent awhile walking around London, I was showing Elder Baker around because he's taking the area over when his companion comes on Wednesday. We had two lessons as well. In one lesson, we were talking about prayer and this one lady expressed that after we had taught her to pray, she was not very good at praying in her own religion. I thought it was funny. We had dinner in Banana and the member we had it with shared possibly the most riveting conversion story I've ever heard, at least the way he told it.

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