Christmas a Day Early?- Week 32

Why yes, it is possible. Yes, you can hear from your friendly neighborhood missionary before p-day. Tomorrow we'll be going on some boating trip with a guy from our ward and an investigator (we're half-working), so we decided to hurry and do our emails today.

Bienvenue encore my friends, to my missionary life here in the Marquesas - the land where white shirts become brown shirts, and I still haven't gotten the guava juice out of my pants.


This week was filled with lots of unlikely adventures, including us finally seeing the mayor and fixing up our English lessons (FINALLY!), the Jehovah's Witnesses' Easter-Feast of Christ-thing, going to Aakapa, and going to Taipivai (other valleys on our island).

With the mayor, Elder Pearson had already primed him for reception by talking about eternal families, so we just talked about that a little, and how the family is important in our religion and how, as a result of that, we sanctify the sabbath day and hold family home evenings and just that was enough. He was very touched, and the spirit was extremely strong in the room. We couldn't really engage him to anything (separation of church and state and all), but this isn't the last time we'll be seeing him (we've still got to smooth out details with the English classes), so hopefully he'll come to us personally. Who knows!

At Aakapa, we helped Coco with his home teaching, and visited our one family out there; giving them a bit of encouragement what with the daunting task ahead of them (Elder Pearson sanctioned the dad to be the leader of the prayer group out there for the people who can't come to the chapel on the other side of the island).

And at Taipivai, it was just home teaching as well, but any work is work (contacting is really giving us nothing at this point) and we've gotta take care of our members and innactives a little bit as well. And while we were out there we filled up water bottles (there's clean source water everywhere on the island except in our village; the capital city of the Marquesas. What a joke) and we picked guava fruits for Soeur Chantal (Coco's wife) to make into jam. It was a silly thought, but truly, it occurred to me that I will probably miss little things like that when I'm home from my mission.

Despite work not being that stellar in this moment, I am still doing very well and am still just loving life. It's truly a reassuring thing to be exactly where the Lord wants you, doing what he wants you to do.


Sincerely,
Elder Harrah


-our Marquesian tags came... mispelled. Come to find out that word is actually Marquesian for "total fail". Who knew?
-Matthew McConaughey as Alma the Elder. What could go wrong?
-flowers




-the "city" at night
-the moon (if I would've had my DSLR this picture would've been lots cooler, but you work with what you've got)
-this picture was an accident. Nailed it.




-the jungle
-pointiest mountains you've ever seen
-we tried to take the squad pic since everybody in the vehicle was in fact wearing sunglasses, but it didn't quite turn out...











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