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Papeete, Tahiti, French Polynesia
Missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. July 24, 2013 - July 24, 2015.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Alright everyone, not much time for emailing this week but I'll see what I can do.
 
So some things that I have come to realize in my time here. These people can eat so much food and do not understand how or why anyone else would not be able eat as much as them. Also they think that the more I eat the stronger I will get, which is definitely false. I have learned also that I am able to eat a lot more food than I thought I could. Sometimes I will start a meal thinking "oh my goodness how am I going to finish all of this" and by the end of the meal I always have a stronger testimony that God answers prayers, no matter how small they are (and no matter how small my stomach is).
Some other cool things that happened this week. Elder Ollerton and I were able to teach an old Tahitian man the first lesson (Joseph Smith story). So I had practiced the lesson a bit beforehand and it went a little rough but I learned pretty much all that I wanted to say. So I get into the lesson and then we get to my part. I was able to say all that I had practiced without really any problems. It was just a really neat experience and I know that I was being helped out during that lesson.
 
Something else kind of fun that happened this week, we decided to do some tracting in Avera. And we decided to walk there, straight over the mountain. One of the reasons that we decided to walk rather than take our bikes, I still am using a members bike and the brakes don't really work. So we figured out that the walk over the 1200ft mountain took about an hour and a half. So while we were in Avera we were able to contact about 9 people (contacting here is difficult, the LDS Church here is pretty well known and people don't have the best view of it) but out of those we were able to set up one lesson for next Friday so we will be taking our bikes that time because my bike gets here tomorrow (Tuesday).
 
Something else that happened this week. Elder Ollerton and I were thinking of ways that we could get the members to work with us more and we were able to come up with the idea to get everyone to make a list of people that they think would be ready to receive the gospel and then next week on fast Sunday we were going to have the families pray and fast to choose one person that they would try and introduce the gospel to. So we told everyone about that at church yesterday and were able to commit a couple families to do it for sure but overall I think it will have a good outcome and hopefully we will get some missionary work rolling here. There is so much potential here, we just need the help of the members to get started.
 
And my last weird update for the week. Some people probably wonder what a normal meal would be like here. Here is an example of some normal meals on Rurutu. So for breakfast I usually take a bowl of water and microwave it for about a minute and add some sugar, some powdered milk, and some Milo (French Polynesian equivalent of hot chocolate mix) and then I put some Sao crackers in that to make it almost a cereal type thing. Its easy to make and pretty efficient so I like it. Lunches we usually eat at the house and it usually consists of bananas (because we have like 75 bananas in our fridge now, literally) and maybe like rice and beans. Just whatever leftovers we were given from members. Then dinners usually consist of either raw fish, which is called poisson cru, or a mixture of like rice and peas and chicken called lentielles, or just some other type of fish. But the raw fish actually doesn't taste that bad and I'm pretty sure its ok to eat because I haven't gotten sick from it yet. But yeah, fish is of the essence here!
 
So thats all I have time for this week. Next week will be a whole different story though. Until next time,
Elder Rose
Send letters to:
 
Elder Cody Tiler Rose
Tahiti Papeete Mission
The Church of Latter Day Saints
B.P. 93 Mormon Mission
Papeete, Tahiti 98714
French Polynesia
 
Letters take 3-6 weeks (use 4-6 stamps)
Packages take 6-8 weeks
 
Elder Rose's e-mail address: cody.rose@myldsmail.net
 
Heres a picture of me chilling with some bananas during our walk to Avera.
 
And here is a picture of our city we live in, Moerai

                                                                  The starfruit we eat.
                                                                  Our missionary house

Monday, October 21, 2013


Today at 8:38 PM
Bonjour tout le monde!
 
This week has been really good. And just full of crazy expériences but I only have time to write about a few of them.
 
Ok so first off there are a ton of people here who speak Tahitian (some even speak this crazy dialect of it called Rurutu where they don't pronounce the F's or the H's). It is just such a blessing to be able to serve and learn Tahitian here. Already I have had some instances where I can't understand like ANY Tahitian but then just like a minute later I can understand almost everything that people are saying. I had this cool experience last week where I couldn't really understand much Tahitian so I prayed about it and for about 30 minutes I only spake Tahitian and after that I could understand significantly more. It really is amazing how when we go out of our way to show our dedication to the Lord we are blessed for it. Already I have been able to see that here.
 
Something else that was pretty cool. We do a lot of OLBing here (Ouvrir le bouche or open the mouth) where we just go around to people and talk to them about the gospel and invite them to take lessons from us. So one day we were walking aroung looking for some OLB opportunities and we decided to go into this dirt road/neighborhood type thing. I was feeling really good about this road, so when we get to the first house we yell our "Ia ora na!" like 3 times, no response. So we move on to the next house. Again nothing. This happens like two more times and by this time I was just thinking "why were we supposed to come down here". So then we go down the road a little further and see this man working on his faapu (farm). So we get up to him and Elder Ollerton starts talking to him in Tahitian and after like a 20 minute conversation in we invited him to take a lesson and he accepted, so now we have a lesson with him this week. It was just really neat how it worked out.
 
This week we also discovered that the top half of our island is super beautiful but not the most fun to bike on. The city on the other side of the island takes about an hour to get to by bike because of how steep the hills are. Because we were both on borrowed bikes (from some members until our bikes would arrive on the boat) the brakes weren't that good. So we had to walk our bikes all the way up and all the way back down the mountain but I got some really cool pictures out of it, I will see if I can send them. But it was just a fun experience. My legs felt like jelly after that day to say the least though.
 
Also something else funny that happened. So on Saturday we bike over to a city about 30 minutes away and on the way back from our lesson we are walking our bikes up this hill and we see what looks like tourists pass us and we wave of course and of course they give us some funny looks and reluctlantly wave back, but as we are continuing up the mountain we see their car stopped and they are taking pictures of the "horizon behind us" (they just wanted to get pictures of us but pretended to be taking pictures of the horizon) and when we get closer to the car one of the girls asks if she can take a picture with us. So she got a picture with two funny looking misisonaries all covered in sweat and wearing helmets. It was just weird to be so amuzing to someone.
And finally on saturday all of our stuff got here! Except my bike, its on the next boat which will be here in about a week. So that was nice, I just kind of wish I had my bike to traverse all of this difficult terrain but no biggie.
 
So yeah, those are my stories for the week. If anyone has any questions about the island or just anything that they want to know they can e-mail me and I will respond in my blog letter. Faaitoito everyone!
Elder Rose
Elder Rose's e-mail address: cody.rose@myldsmail.net
 Send letters to:
 Elder Cody Tiler Rose
Tahiti Papeete Mission
The Church of Latter Day Saints
B.P. 93 Mormon Mission
Papeete, Tahiti 98714
French Polynesia
 
Letters take 2-3 weeks (use 4-6 stamps)
Packages take 4-6 weeks

Monday, October 14, 2013

Ia Ora Na everyone! 

First off, sorry if there are any weird spelling errors, I'm typing on a french keyboard...
But I finally made it out to the field! My companion is Elder Ollerton and he has been out for almost a year now and he is a super awesome teacher and is pretty much fluent in Tahitian and is fluent in French so I am very happy about that.  

I got assigned to an island about 250 miles south of Tahiti called Rurutu where they speak mostly Tahitian and a little French. The biggest surprise to me about this assignment was that this island has been closed to missionaries for about 2 years and Elder Ollerton and I have been assigned to re-open it. And we are the only two missionaries on this island for now which is kind of weird but really cool.

We are in the city called Moerai. We have a single branch with about 120 people in it. The members here are super awesome though and have already been helping us out so much with finding people and just doing missionary work. Our first lesson we taught was with a 15 year old boy named Tuarii we were able to set up a baptisimal date for him already, he just has to ask his parents and make sure that they are ok with it. Anyway, the work here is great and the members are so great. I can already tell this is going to be a very enjoyable stay for me no matter how long I am here for (which could be anywhere from 3 months to 9 months). I have been studying Tahitian like crazy. Its really hard to understand right now for me but I'm just going to keep working on it. I would eventually like to be better at Tahitian than French because I think that would be super cool and we have so many opportunities to teach in Tahitian here.

OK funny story for the week. When Elder Ollerton and I were flying out here to Rurutu we first stopped on an island called Rimatara (which we didn't know until later). So we actually end up getting off on this small island and we were really confused because we had heard that Rurutu was a lot bigger and so we get into the airport and someone walks up to us and in English says "what are you doing here?" and we said "we have been assigned to this island" (thinking that we had been assigned to that island) and she seemed kind of confused and said "my family and I are the only members on the whole island". She quickly informed us that we were on the wrong island and we were able to board the plane before it took off. And something else kind of funny. Our luggage is being shipped here on a boat and it doesn't get here for like another week and a half but luckily I packed most of the things I needed.

Anyway, to summarize this island. It is small but beautiful island filled with about 2000 amazing people and I feel so blessed to be able to serve here. And it looks exactly like the island from Jurassic park, that's a good way to describe it.

That's about all I have time for this week but I will definitely have some more crazy stories for next week. 

Elder Rose
Send letters to:

Elder Cody Tiler Rose
Tahiti Papeete Mission
The Church of Latter Day Saints
B.P. 93 Mormon Mission
Papeete, Tahiti 98714
French Polynesia

Letters take 2-3 weeks  (4-5 stamps)
Packages take 4-6 weeks

Elder Rose's e-mail address: cody.rose@myldsmail.net
Elder Ollerton and I

Personal study is hard when the sun is in your eyes