Elder Cody Tiler Rose

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