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