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
Good morning, how are you?
ReplyDeleteMy name is Emilio, I am a Spanish boy and I live in a town near to Madrid. I am a very interested person in knowing things so different as the culture, the way of life of the inhabitants of our planet, the fauna, the flora, and the landscapes of all the countries of the world etc. in summary, I am a person that enjoys traveling, learning and respecting people's diversity from all over the world.
I would love to travel and meet in person all the aspects above mentioned, but unfortunately as this is very expensive and my purchasing power is quite small, so I devised a way to travel with the imagination in every corner of our planet. A few years ago I started a collection of used stamps because through them, you can see pictures about fauna, flora, monuments, landscapes etc. from all the countries. As every day is more and more difficult to get stamps, some years ago I started a new collection in order to get traditional letters addressed to me in which my goal was to get at least 1 letter from each country in the world. This modest goal is feasible to reach in the most part of countries, but unfortunately, it is impossible to achieve in other various territories for several reasons, either because they are very small countries with very few population, either because they are countries at war, either because they are countries with extreme poverty or because for whatever reason the postal system is not functioning properly.
For all this, I would ask you one small favor:
Would you be so kind as to send me a letter by traditional mail from French Polynesia? I understand perfectly that you think that your blog is not the appropriate place to ask this, and even, is very probably that you ignore my letter, but I would call your attention to the difficulty involved in getting a letter from that country, and also I don’t know anyone neither where to write in French Polynesia in order to increase my collection. a letter for me is like a little souvenir, like if I have had visited that territory with my imagination and at same time, the arrival of the letters from a country is a sign of peace and normality and an original way to promote a country in the world. My postal address is the following one:
Emilio Fernandez Esteban
Avenida Juan de la Cierva, 44
28902 Getafe (Madrid)
Spain
If you wish, you can visit my blog www.cartasenmibuzon.blogspot.com where you can see the pictures of all the letters that I have received from whole World.
Finally, I would like to thank the attention given to this letter, and whether you can help me or not, I send my best wishes for peace, health and happiness for you, your family and all your dear beings.
Yours Sincerely
Emilio Fernandez