Serving in London... Kiritimati

We are living in the stick house with two other elders - It's really, really tight. We need our own house.  We got here Wednesday at 6;15 after a red eye. I didn't sleep, it was a really rough flight for whatever reason. Lots of turbulence. But we slept on Wednesday. Sisters came with us Thursday to show us all our people. Same situation as Abaiang, we're essentially starting over.  They had a big baptism last week with a bunch of their people, so it's a clean slate I guess. We got fifteen lessons Friday to Sunday, mostly just tracting and finding. 

The house we are looking at is a members guest house for when scientists come to study the fish here. But the scientists come once every two years for two weeks, so we could live there because no one is in it the rest of the time. It's also a stick house, but it's right on the beach, like literally. So it's got an awesome breeze and it's really cool. Hopefully Pres approves it.  President Anderson will probably go take a look with sister Anderson this week sometime. I imagine we'll know this week or next week.

I left the day our branch split, so I know every one in our branch. It's just now the London members are separate. I see all kinds of people I know, lots of them. We essentially will never not have a dinner, all the people in my old area are happy to feed us if I were to ask. 

 Sion is the man. Or lessons are super "flowy". He's easy to teach with and easy to get along with. East coast vibe is definitely a good thing for both of us. Sion is a legend. His parents were born and raised in Honduras, but they moved to Michigan so his dad could work as an engineer for Ford. He was born and raised in Detroit and he is the man. He's been out 6 months longer than me, and he's killer at the language. 

I'm exhausted. I went 27 hours without sleeping Tuesday into Wednesday. Ouch. Fiji is always rough. Honestly, the country is kind of gross. And I feel bad for the airport elders there, because they want to try to work, but it's just not reasonable with so many people. They took all of us transits to a lesson, so it was 2 Fijian speakers, us Kiribati elders, 2 sisters straight from the MTC heading to New Caledonia French speaking, and a guy headed to Vanuatu. We tried to teach a lesson in Fijian. So. That went about as well as you imagine it did hahaha!  But... we got pizza afterwards and it was pretty delicious. I also bought some sweet Nikes at the airport- American money equivalent of 35$ and they're sweet. Good deal. I needed new p-day shoes anyways. My vans got retired on Abaiang :(

Other elders are Elder Tarati (from Kiribati, former zone leader, awesome guy) and Elder Aru ( from Vanuatu).  Anderson's are still here, they leave in less than a month, mid-November. And no more cats :( they all left I guess. I don't want to ask, I'm worried they were possibly evicted.

One good story was from last night. We had a district (think stake) fireside for all the elders on the island. We had like 50 something Melchizedek priesthood holders come! It was so encouraging, I saw a man named Baibuke. He was really less active when I first got here, but we went back to his house and we taught lessons with his daughter Kabikea and he came back to church :) He's super active!  He has a calling in the Sunday school now and it was great to shake his hand again. Great guy. 

We have fun plans this afternoon. 8 of us should make it better. Sion has been on outies almost 10 months, with a 2 month break on Tarawa in the middle  he just got back from Mwakin and he's sick I having lame p-days. So we'll play games or something for sure. And a washing machine is literally a gift from heaven. I hate hand washing. 

(Ed reminded him of the quote "Work like it all depends on you, Pray like it all depends on the Lord.")  That quote is a good one, it's in the talk I told you guys to read from Elder Gene R. Cook that Kalani sent me about exercising faith. I wrote the 6 steps he lists in the back of my planner just to remind me of them. Good talk. 

Love you guys. Thanks so much! Have a great week!

Love, Dal