Transfers and Tiger-Striped Feet

We got pictures!

This picture of his feet cracks me up - Sandals and rolled up pants make for weird tan lines.

Dear Mom, Dad, Taylor and Cami!

Hello from Christmas Island! It was so great to read all of your weekly updates and hear about life back home. I'm glad you're all having such a good time and are enjoying the winding-down part of school. Sounds like Special Olympics was so fun, I'm jealous you guys got to go. I really do think that is such a good thing for the youth to do. I'm glad to hear lacrosse is going well for everyone, that's certainly fun. Dad about broke my heart sending me the 49ers' season schedule... if you go to a Seattle game while I'm gone I will never forgive you, that's a promise. Sorry to hear about Mom's poor wrist, that looks like it is not a whole lot of fun. Hopefully things work out so that no more surgeries are necessary and you can start to heal a little bit more!

This week was a really good, really busy week. We had transfers this week, and my trainer Elder Paora got sent back to Tarawa now. Sister Lavulavu also went back to Tarawa, so we had a new elder and a new sister come in. Elder Fa'oliu is from Tonga, and he's working in Banana with Elder Davis now. Sister Banimone is actually from Christmas Island... and she's working in her hometown with Sister Johnson. I'm still working Tabwakea, and my new companion is Elder Raika. Raika is from Fiji, and he used to be Elder Davis's companion in Banana. But he was asked to be the new district leader, so he moved down to work with me. I'm really grateful to get to work with him, he's a really great missionary. He has been out for 15 months, and he's got arguably the best Kiribati in the mission. I hope to be able to pick up as much as I can from him. Especially the Fijian accent for my Kiribati, because it sounds sweet. It's been so nice to just be able to go out and work hard instead of sitting in the house wasting time. 

Monday, and Tuesday, AND Wednesday, we didn't really get any work done. We were just dealing with transfers, getting packed and blah blah blah. Long days of being bored basically. Also, the mail that was supposed to come in on the plane on Wednesday did not come because the plane was too heavy, so all the mail stayed in FIji this week. Hopefully that means heavy packages for missionaries :)

Transfers were crazy even after the planes all left: We had some serious confusion from the APs in Marshalls. For whatever reason, their system has me working in Banana, and Davis in Tabwakea, so they had told elder Fa'oliu that he would be in Tabwakea to work with Davis. But, that's just wrong. So then they were trying to fix it all, and they decided, well, we should just let Fa'oliu stay in Tabwakea with Seguine, that's okay. So Fa'oliu stayed one night in Tabwakea with me. We woke up the next morning however, and the APs had sent another email to us, and President Weir had overridden their attempt to fix everything, so Raika and Fa'oliu were going to switch back. Basically, what we thought was originally going to happen, did happen, with some weirdness going on in the middle. Transfers are rough!

Thursday it rained ALL DAY again. So we just biked around setting times and doing are best to set ourselves up for Friday. We were cold, and Raika got a little bit sick actually. It's still weird that 70 degrees is cold enough to make us sick.

Friday, we left at 1 and did not come back til 7. We taught a lot of people, got everything all set for the baptism on Saturday, and found 3 new investigators. It was my first day really teaching with Raika, and I love the way he teaches. It's way different from how I had been teaching lessons before, and I feel like it gives us a lot more room to help our people to really understand the doctrines we're teaching. It was also good to get some language help, and I'm really looking to improve this transfer.

Saturday we taught lessons in the morning, and had a baptism in the afternoon. We baptized three little girls who were part of less-active families. They were all really good and very ready for baptism. I was so proud that they were all early to the baptism! It was scheduled to start at 5, and they were all there at 4:30, which is a miracle considering the sisters' baptizee didn't show til 5:20. Kiribati time is just really, really late I guess. I was actually blessed to be able to perform the baptisms for all of our people. It was really great. I felt very confident in the language, and didn't stumble over names of the prayer or anything. It was very fun, and I was grateful to have been given the opportunity to do so. I really felt the spirit throughout the whole baptismal service and they all seemed to really be happy.

On Sunday, we had Church as usual. Oddly enough, there were more fisherman out visiting the island who were members! A dad and his son. So I got more translating practice. It's still exhausting, but I'm getting pretty good at it. They were actually the nicest people ever, they knew that there were missionaries on the island, so they brought us a kite as a gift! So we'll try to learn how to fly the kite later today. It's one of those fancy two-line trick kites. Anyway, they were so nice. After church, we had another ward rescue. We opened the invitation to all the members, not just auxiliary presidencies, and we had a great turnout. We made close to 40 visits, and got a few referrals to look into this week. It's really been going well for us, and I'm excited to see the program take off.

I think that's really about it for me this week! Lots of busyness, and lots of good hard work. I'm really grateful for the way everything is turning out and I'm excited to really get going with the work here. Thanks for all of your emails and prayers of support! I love you all, talk to you next week!

Love Dal

Baptism with Elder Paora before transfers

This is the meal the family gave him last week.  He told the story in his letter.

This can of American Coke made him SOOOO happy.

This is the first baby kitty.  It is really into reading the scriptures with Dallin.

A big storm brought down some limbs.

So amazing!

Cookout on the beach!

P-day on the beach.

Elder Davis had a birthday!  I assume this is the church(?)

A family in his area.

Happy Easter!

(This is the beach where they went for their p-day picnic.  Ummm..... gorgeous!  I snagged it from one of the sisters in his district.  He promises pictures next week.)  

Dear Mom, Dad, Taylor and Cami,

Hi to all of you! Looks like you all had a really crazy week. Lots of stuff going on, per usual. Glad to hear that Mom's surgery went well! It'll be so nice for her to have a working hand again. And it looks like lacrosse is going well for everyone, that's fun too! I'm jealous Cami got to see Captain America 2, genuinely very jealous. I've been trying not to think about that one, but geez that's one I wish I could see. Don't spoil it for me I guess haha I'm very glad you thought it was good though. Something fun to look forward to.

This week was soooo crazy! Transfers are happening on Wednesday, we had an island-wide holiday weekend Friday through Monday, there was a solid 36 hours of rain, and alll kinds of general insanity every day. SO much so, I'm actually just going to go through day by day this week, since it was so filed with lots of things going on!

Monday: The only story from Monday was actually a kind of sad one :( Monday is our p-day, but p-day ends at 6. So we had a family home evening/ dinner planned with this less active family: Bwauro and Kaitia. We've been really working hard with this family and their kids as well to get them to be able to come back to church. One of their daughters was baptized last week, and hopefully another will be baptized in two weeks. ANyways, we had a great lesson all prepared on happiness for them, and we were so excited to go give our lesson. However, when we got there, only Kaitia was at home. Bwauro was off drinking, and all the kids had run away to play games or something. To make matters even worse, it had been cloudy all day and their solar light had not charged so there was no light to give the FHE even if the family had been ready. I felt so very sad for Kaitia, who was trying to really save her family, and she was even looking to us Elders for help. She had kindof given up hope, and thought that we would be angry for them not following through. Obviously, we weren't, we just wanted to help more than we were actually able to. We set a time for Wednesday, and just told her that we loved their family and we knew there was still hope. She was crying, and she was so grateful she wanted to give us the dinner that we would have had anyways. She went into the house and came back out with a package of crackers, a tin of corned beef, and a small can of sweetened condensed milk. I almost started crying. They were so clearly so poor and this was probably all the food they had for the night, but she gave it to us, and she wouldn't let us refuse it. I guess that's the power that being able to give someone hope has. I was really humbled, and it really made me think about just how much of a real responsibility we have each day to fulfill our callings as missionaries. Very sad, but an experience I will remember for a very long time. 

Tuesday: Okay, Tuesday wasn't necessarily crazy, other than the fact that it was a normal day, and that hardly ever happens. We had lessons planned from 1-7, and none fell through, and so we were exhausted, but very happy that it all went well. Great day. Right as we were going to bed though, it started raining pretty hard outside. Which leads us to Wendesday...

Wednesday: It rained HARD. All day long. Not even like sprinly rain or shower rain, it was pelting hard for 24 hours straight. Tuesday night was so hard to sleep, our roof leaked onto my feet, and when the wind gusted, the rain blew through the walls and got us wet. We were freezing cold, and I slept for like 4 hours probably. It was cold all day, and I actually put on a long sleeve shirt and socks to try and be warm. Even though it was rainy and so gloomy, we went out to teach our people if we could. Unfortunately, everyone was equally cold wet and gloomy, so we had to reschedule all our lessons. We spent a lot of time in the house jsut reading and trying to stay warm. Bonus though, because we went out even though it was pouring rain, two of our people gave us food to say thanks! We got a delicious cooked lobster, and all of the meat out of a TURTLE. Turtle meat is really really weird to eat, because it's like red meat, but it's also like fish too? So it was really good. We battered and fried it and shared with the sisters. So it wasn't too bad of a day, it just felt like it lasted forever because we didn't do anything haha

Thursday: We started Thursday with district meeting, and I got to give our last training before the transfers happen. I had everyone come up with their favorite talk from conference, and we all talked about it and how we were going to apply it in our lives to be better missionaries. I picked Bishop Stevensen's 4-minutes talk again. It seemed very applicable. A new insight I thought of while preparing my section of the training was that in looking at a mission, 4 minutes at the beginning is just the same as 4 minutes at the end, and our effort should be equal. It was interesting, and it made me think of when Dad would always tell me that points at the beginning of a semester are just as important as points at the end of a semester. After that, we had lessons and jsut a pretty normal day. Also, I received a can of American Coke, and I was very happy.

Friday: Friday was a good day! We taught lessons, and we got to teach about the temple to two of our investigators who are ready to be baptized on the 10th of May. We've been workign with them for almsot 2 months now, and Friday was the lesson they fully committed to being members of this church. They're very very ready, and we're so excited for them for the 10th (they have to wait for their marriage paper to go through, thus the wait; otherwise I would baptize them tomorrow!). Their names are Kareobwa and Kabure. We found them on a random tract after a lesson fell through once. At the end of the lesson we told them Paora was leaving, and Kabure totally started crying. I'm glad we have been able to really grow close to them and to see them progress so far.

Saturday: Unfortunately, kindof a lost day. We did service in the morning, and collected church clothes from the different "stores" in London for our investogators who didn't have any clothes for church. We went around and gave those out so everyone would be ready for Easter Sunday. After that, we went back home and spent the afternoon writing Elder Paora's BYU application essays. Not that I have a lot of results to prove it, but I'm really good at college applications, so I felt like it went well for him and he's on track with his essays. We also had a really good lunch with some members, who made some potatoes and corn and HAM and TURKEY. It was like a real Easter meal, and it was so good. No lessons, but we got all our people the clothes they needed.

Sunday: Busy busy busy Suday. Happy Easter too! We had Elder Paora and Sister Lavulavu speak in sacrament meeting, because they're both leaving on Wednesday, and Utimawa and Francis, our branch clerk and his wife. They talked about the Atonement and the Resurrection, and it was so good. There was a group of fishermen from Montana visiting Christmas Island for vacation, and one of their group was a member and so they all came to church with us. I got to translate for all of them, and I feel like I did a really good job. The best part is, if I missed a little bit or something, I could still just make something up and they would never know :) Still though, I got mostly everything translated well, even Utimawa and Francis. After that we had two lessons, then we came back for the ward Rescue. Elder Paora and I, Sister Lavulavu and Sister Johnson, and all of the Auxiliary presidencies in the church met up at 4:30, and divided into companionships. After that, we wrote the names of all the less-active or inactive members on the board who we could think of who needed help and a special Easter message. So then we divided everyone up, and went out to find them! I got to go with Kaata, or Elders' Quorum President. He is the man, and he's an RM. He served in Wellington NZ. We visited 4 people and got to share an Easter message. It was good, I felt like I had no communication issues, even though he was a native speaker, and it was a good time working together. He's the man, and he really knows what he's doing. All told, everyone together visited about 23-30 people, and everyone said it went well. Hopefully they all felt loved and will come back to church on Sunday.

Monday: P-day! We actually planned something fun because we didn't have to worry about going to get to the email place right on time and fighting for a computer. We planned a picnic at the beach and took our whole district out to this super awesome LDS campground the church owns. It's a beautiful beach in the middle of nowhere, and it was so fun! We ate food, played games, built a fire and built sandcastles. We could've stayed all day, but it started to rain after about 3 hours. So we went home.

Elder Davis's birthday was on the 20th, so we had some cake, and then we got to watch a movie! President and Sister Anderson told us it was okay, and since they're in the mission presidency, we didn't ask twice. They let us look through the movies they brought and pick one. We picked Rudy, that movie about Notre Dame football. So fun. Pretty good movie actually, I had never seen it, but it was so fun. After that, I got a haircut, first haircut since the MTC. Let's jsut say I really needed it. SIster Anderson cut it and she did a pretty good job actually. I look like a missionary again! After that, we had dinner at Nakala's house, and it was delicious.

Geez, worlds longest week, and world's longest letter. Hopefully it's enough! I had lots of fun. I love and miss you all, I'll send pictures to go wit this all next week! I love you again!

Love Dal

Lobster and Transfers!

Hi Mom, Dad, Taylor and Cami!

Looks like all of you had a very busy week. Sounds like lots of fun too! I'm glad I get to read your emails and hear from you, it's great to see how you're all doing. I'm also jealous of you having so much fun! Just calm down please, you're too fun. 

This was a good week for me too! We had lots of lessons and we got to meet with lots of people. We also had a baptism on Saturday! That was great. We're having lots of fun and we're trying to take everything we have happen to us and make it positive. It's not always easy, but making an effort certainly helps. 

One lesson we had last night went super well. We're teaching two new investigators, Manuea and Tiim, who were a referral we received from Manuea's brother Utimawa who is our Branch clerk. It went really well, and they are excited to think about looking more into the church. They were so grateful that we came, that they decided to pay us back with food! SO Tiim got up from the lesson afterwards and walked over to the fridge. He pulled out two live lobsters, bigger than any lobsters I've ever seen. Then, he put them right into a pot of boiling water. And then he gave them to us! That was it. No spices or anything, he just boiled them and then he showed us how to open them and such. I ate the whole lobster tail and it was soo good and it was just pure lobster. Wow. That was the best lesson of the week. They are so nice and they've clearly been very prepared for us to be able to teach them.

Another Conference talk I really liked from last week was the talk by Bishop Gary E. Stevenson about the Olympics and making every second count. He talked about how in the Olympics, 4 minutes are the decision for years and years of practice and pain and work to make it all the way there. He made a comparison that our life is full of "4-minute performances," where so so much rides on something that's very relatively small. He talked about how we need to recognize those moments when they come, and really make them count for all their worth. It was really interesting to me to think about times in my life where I've had a "4-minute performance," and to think about whether or not my performance was medal-worthy. I think obviously, the mission as a whole comes to mind as one of those relatively short periods of time that will have such a big impact beyond just itself. It really made me stop to think about what it means to give your all. Even more than that though, sometmies 4 minutes can literally be 4 minutes, just in a lesson or on a street. It made me stop to think about the value of small experiences and the potential impact that can be had down the road. Preparation is a big key, and I'm going to look at my studies in the morning in a new light, so we can se things as they really are and as they really affect other things around me. It was a very very interesting talk, and it gave me a lot to think about. 

Other than that, this week was just a normal week! Lots of busyness, and lots of things to get done. I'm grateful for eveyone's prayers of support, I really needed them. Thanks for all of your love and willingness to support me through this time. I'm grateful for and love all of you! Thanks again. I will talk to you all next week!

Love, Dal

*During our time online with Dallin he got an email from the APs and found out his companion was being transferred and Elder Raika would be his new companion.  He is from Fiji and is apparently an ace at Kiribati, so Dallin won't be speaking any English for a while.  He is excited for a change!  He also was informed that he should expect to be on an outer island by June.  Sigh.  That most likely means no contact for the time he is there, but we will deal with that when/if it happens.

He had a good week this week and has been working hard on The Rescue within the ward.  They are finding success inviting people to come back.  He seemed more upbeat than he has in the past few weeks and it was nice to hear.  His living conditions are just so rough that I think he is still adjusting to his new normal.  The constant rain for weeks now has made working very difficult, but they are even adjusting to that.  We are so grateful for his service and example and can't wait to hear from him every week!

Spiritual Traction

(The poor guy has been soaked constantly for a couple weeks now.  Mission rules on the island are a little more relaxed.  He does not have to button his top button and the sandals and rolled up pants are just part of walking through water all the time.) 

Hi Mom, Dad, Taylor and Cami,

I hope that everyone has had a good week! I was jealous to read your emails about the fun John Williams concert, sounds like all of you had a really good time. I'm also glad you were able to enjoy general conference! We were so lucky out here that we got to see most of it. We had to wake up at 5 on Sunday and Monday to go to the sessions, which was honestly really hard. We got up so early because the first session started at 6 am, and then the second started at 10. We had enough time as well after to work a full day, so that was tough. Either way, it was great to hear everything that the Prophet and Apostles had to say for us. We were very lucky to see it all live at a member's house. The signal was really sketchy, but we only missed the second half of the Saturday Afternoon session. Other than that everything ended up going really smoothly. 

My favorite talk is hard to pick, I liked so many. I'll probably talk about a few in the next couple emails. One that really stuck out to me was Elder Bednar's talk, when he gave the story of the 4-wheel drive truck and the firewood. He talked about when we're "spiritually stuck," or when we're like that truck and we're not getting any traction to progress spiritually, what we need is a spiritual load, something that will give us traction. In the story, Elder Bednar talks about how the truck was spinning on all 4 tires up until the driver put all the firewood in the back of the truck. The weight of the firewood helped the truck to get the traction it needed to get back on the road, or to start making progress again. Sometimes even if we feel like we're doing everything we can, we might just be spining our wheels and going nowhere. In times like that, we need to make sure we have the right load. It was really cool for me to think about how oftentimes when we want to progress, and get out of a rut, we have to do something more, even when we feel like we're doing everything we can. It made me think about what more I can do, and how important it is to continue to progress.

The rest of this week was pretty good. Last week ended with crazy rain, and I got a bad cough. Instead of being smart and taking things easy though, I decided to work through it and ended up compromising my immune system and getting really sick. I had some form of the flu or something, and it was NOT fun. That made things in general really tough, but in the end I survived and I made it through the week. 

We've been finding and teaching a lot of less-active families lately. It's harder for us to prepare for, because our less active people have already heard all of our lessons. We have to sometimes think outside the box, and we pretty much always change it on the fly. Whatever it is, it is working. We had 10 less active members come to church this past week, which was a big deal. We were very happy to see them all make it back and to enjoy church again. 

Our biggest struggle right now is just finding people who want to listen. We have a very small teaching pool, and that makes it tough to really just go to work and not have down time. Rain doesn't really help with downtime either, because if it rains people generally just want their lesson re-scheduled. I suppose it's understandable, because soaking wet Elder's getting their house dirty is generally not high on anyone's wishlist. Either way, our goal of staying busy is often frustrated by the weather. 

One really good lesson we gave this week was about staying focused. Oddly enough, I felt like I was teaching the lesson to myself more than either of our investigators who were listening. We read the story of when Christ walked on the water, and how Peter was able to exercise his faith and do the same. However, when the wind and everything around him started to get more intense, Peter started to get scared, and he began to doubt. Right when he started to doubt he started to sink. The most important part though was that Peter did not just give up and start to swim - Peter was a fisherman after all, he was clearly capable of treading water. Instead of relying on himself and just "surviving" Peter decided to look to the Savior. In doing so he again used his faith, and Christ took his hand and lifted him out of the water to stand next to him. The symbolism in the story really struck me for some reason, that when we rely on ourselves, we can survive. But we can't do anything more than that. We can get by, but getting by should never be our goal. When we look to Christ however, and choose to rely on Him rather than on ourselves, we can do so much more than we can ever do on our own. We'll all have bad days or bad weeks when we feel like we're sinking. But It's up to us to choose whether or not we'll rely on our own strength, and just get by or just make it through, or if we'll rely on Christ and truly overcome. I'm still trying to learn how I can do that everyda, and I'll be the first to admit I need work. But at least I know how I can get there, and I'm excited to try.

I love you all! Thanks for your prayers of support and guidance. I really need them. I'll talk to you all next week!

Love Dal

*PS... here are the baby kittens.  They are surviving!