Its been a while since my last blog post so I will try to catch up on everything that has happened in the last six weeks. First off I got transfered. I am now serving at the main island of Tahiti in the city of Paea and my area is Papehue. My companion, Elder Dagry, is a 21 year old French elder that has been serving for a little over 17 months now. He is very cool and has a funny sense of humor.
Papehue is a pretty small area, maybe 2 miles wide with a lot of neighborhoods. The areas here are very different in comparison to the islands away from Tahiti. First off I went from having almost whole islands to myself to one of the smallest areas in the mission. There is a very high concentration of people here and I find that people are less willing to accept the Gospel here. I'm still trying to find my rhythm in this mildly fast paced city, its just weird because the whole 18 months of my mission I spent out in the islands was a different way to do missionary work. The good thing is we still have a car so thats nice, but we have been doing a lot of walking lately because we found that it is a lot more efficient for contacting.
In our area we have about three solid investigators. One is a 27 year old named Andy; he is like 6'4" and plays american football for one of three american football teams here at Tahiti. Andy didn't really have a religion before he started taking lessons about five months ago, but he really wants to learn for himself the truthfullness of our message. Our last lesson we talked about Alma 32 and the importance of feeding our faith (testimony) with good actions like going to church and reading. Usually Andy comes to church for only the second hour but we committed him to come for all three hours and sure enough Andy was there for all three hours and we even saw him reading the Book of Mormon during sacrament meeting. We also teach a 12 year old boy named Manuarii who wants to get baptized but his parents don't want him to because he was already baptized in the Catholic church when he was a baby. Other than that we spend a good two hours a day doing door to door and street contacting. We are very busy all week long. The past month we have had a good bit of tender mercies from the Lord. We have been able to find a lot of people who have never heard our message of the restored Gospel of Christ and who are interested in learning more.
Every pday since I have gotten here we try to do an activity with another zone, like flag football or soccer and so pdays are pretty fun. All of the missionaries serving at Tahiti will be singing in a missionary choir sometime in June, and so a lot of our pdays now are going to go toward practicing for the concert. The good thing about having practice almost every Monday is that all the missionaries serving in Tahiti get to see each other often. The bad thing is that we loose over half of a pday so there isn't a lot we can do on pdays now.
Almost every day for lunch we eat something called Chao pao which is slightly cooked bread dough with chicken in the middle. See the picture below.
And for those wanting to know when I finish my mission, I finish August 10th and I am planning on going to BYU Idaho starting September 11th. Don't worry I'm not trunky. Have an excellent week everyone!
Elder Rose
My Zone
