Things are going great here in papehue. I only have six weeks left and since I have only been here 12 weeks I thought that I would finish my mission in this area but president was inspired to place me elsewhere. I'm staying on Tahiti but I'm going to be going to the stake of Mahina (on the north side of the island. I'm on the south side of the island right now) in the area Faaripo. I'm very excited to be able to do missionary work in a different area here at Tahiti.

 

And my big news for the week (if a transfer wasn't big enough news) I got my flight itinerary for when I finish my mission. My plane leaves August 10th at 11:40pm and I get to the airport in Georgia August 11th at 10:15pm, so I'm going to spend pretty much a full day traveling. More time for me to do some contacting! But until then I'm hear at Tahiti in body and spirit. 

 

Our mission started doing missionary concerts, which means that every Sunday we go to a different stake and sing and bear testimonies. The topic for these concerts, or rather missionary firesides, is the Plan of Salvation. Its too bad I can't record it and send it to all of you, it is very powerful and every time we have one of these concerts I feel the spirit testifying to me of the truthfulness of the Plan of Salvation. Everything is dandy here though and I don't have much time to write. I will try to get out at least one or two more blog posts before I finish my mission in six weeks.  AND HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

                           This is our last zone picture before the transfer

 

And this picture shows how we are feeling in French Polynesia at this time of the year. It gets down to like 60 something degrees which is very cold here!

Elder Rose

 

Our area is doing alright here. We weren't able to do a lot of lessons this week, we had a lot of bad luck and a lot of people canceled their lessons, but this week we went to the monthly leadership meeting also. 

And today was pretty good, we went to a singing practice for the concert this sunday and right after that we got to watch meet the mormons. We watched it in French and even if I didn't understand everything in it the spirit was super powerful and I really enjoyed it. It was pretty inspiring for me and I really see the importance of service.

Elder Rose

Our ward had a Hawaiian night activity so I decided to take advantage a little of the props. 

We cleaned out the house this morning and this is what happens after years of members dropping off the food at the missionaries' house. There are probably over 100 plates and one dinner appointment might be 2 plates. 

This is what I do with the Tahitian fruit called rambuton when we don't want to eat it

 

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

Pday activity with the zone

We went on a hike and there was a nice waterfall at the end

                                The picture on the bridge is our district. I love our district so much

         From left to right, Elder Rose, Dagry, Lee Chip Sao, Temake, Gouttin, Pruett, Hughes, and Poirier

We ate pizza last night. Its been a while since we've eaten pizza so we were pretty excited

I got to see some of my good mission friends at a meeting we had this week. Its great to be serving at Tahiti now.

  

Last pday we went to Teahupoo, a world fameous surf spot. Don't worry mom we didn't do any surfing. We just took pictures next to the welcome surfboard and then we left

Today (pday) we played flag football against a neighboring zone and lost. It was fun playing football again though.

3 in 1 banana. This thing was massive.

 We flew to Tahiti for a leadership meeting. Its only a 45 min flight. There weren't a ton of people on the plane so we had a little fun.