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