Fishing With the President

Hi Family!  Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Birthday to Dad!

No big news here, only 4/6 for baptisms this week :( Two kids got forbidden by their Baha'i Fijian dad... situation was really sad. But they both came to church! So we're still working on it. It was really sad for them, but I think they'll be able to make it. We'll go back to them this week too and just keep trying to keep them on track. No new investigators. We are struggling really bad to find people. No one wants to give us referrals. Baptisms we had were good, 2 in YW and 2 in Rs. Their lessons went super well and they're really solid members. We're trying to teach their families but they don't seem receptive. Branch is good, but the cultural disregard for time and appointments means it's hard to get people (even leadership) to come to baptisms.

We'll be in a new house in January, we're waiting for the current tenant's contract to finish up. No transfers in December :( When January comes around, I'll have been on Christmas for like a third of my entire mission. It's our own fault too, Sion emailed the AP and he said were not being moved because we're doing too good of work. I should be happy, but I am getting bored of Christmas!

Awesome to see the gang! (Dallin's friends dropped by) Too bad that they're all split up a little bit now. But still good to see them. 

I think next p-day were going fishing with president, so we'll see how that goes :)  We won't be on a boat or anything, we'll probably just stand on the beach, and fish out to the ocean. 

We had thanksgiving here Thursday and we had chicken, gravy, stuffing, potatoes, corn, and rolls. It was legit and it cost way too much. Our senior couple made it for us and it was so good. SO GOOD. American food is going to be so nice when I get home!

I'm excited for President to come.  I'll try and take this week on with a fresh look. Hopefully we can keep it all working and under control. I love you guys, thanks for keeping me in your thoughts. I have to go now, we have a lesson at 2 and 4 hours of finding afterwards to try to fill our planners. Hopefully we can get some new investigators. Thanks for everything, have a good week! Happy Thanksgiving again! 

Love Dal

Thanksgiving

My week was Great! We had lots of fun. Lots of lessons and 2 baptisms. We had 6 pass interviews, so we're looking at 6 baptisms this week! So much fun.  We try to visit our people every day. We just constantly run out of investigator's. Our teaching pool is getting turned around so fast we always have to be on a finding grind. 

One Investigator is a little girl named Vicky. She's 8. Her aunt is a member and we teach her and her brother Karaiti. Super sad story, one of her older sisters is a member of a different church, and she told Vicky that if she got baptized she was sinning. But, she decided that she was going to pray about it, and she decided that she wanted to be baptized. She also said that she wants to help her older sister too. Great little kid. 

The work is going great, but well digging is terrible. I'm exhausted. We dug a well this week, it was so deep and it was tiring. We had it to the point we filled buckets at the bottom and lifted them out. So. Much. Work. 

Bad news - our house was awful and we left after two days. We're back in the Tabwakea house. The house was inside a compound, and the other compound inhabitants were pretty heavy drinkers. So we got out ASAP.

Transfers are December 17th.  We have no idea still where we are going and it's killing us. Sion is going to email the AP and president is coming in on December 3rd, so hopefully he'll fill us in then.  We're hoping to leave together. We'll see though. 

New senior couple is great! Elder and Sister Seamons. He worked for CES and he's a gospel prodigy. He is giving district meeting on Thursday and I'm stoked.

(We asked about Thanksgiving plans) I think we'll probably get to eat turtle, which is close to turkey when you say it out loud. Yeah. Just Kidding, we don't eat turtle ;)

(Elder Smith from Dallin's district is in a new video about bullying.  Dallin told the girls to watch it and to quit being bullies - of course just giving them a hard time.) An elder in my district is in a Mormon message about bullying! He's the main guy hahahaha we just watched it, it's funny. It's a pretty new Mormon message about bullying and it's like 10 minutes long you guys should watch it. 

That's all for this week!  Have a great week and talk to you soon!  Love you all!

Dal

Best Week Yet... and a Birthday Cake for Mom!

Hi Mom and Dad and Taylor and Cami!

I'm currently waiting for the email counter to open here at the Linnix office (Christmas island is the biggest island in the Line and Phoenix island chains, so they're clever and they call their government offices the Linnix), and it should have opened about 35 minutes ago, but the lady is not here yet, so I'm just writing a big long email before we can chat. It's probably good I've go some time this morning because this was a crazy week! SO busy. But honestly, probably the best week of my mission so far- so, so fun. Just to make sure I don't miss anything and since I've got time, I'll do a day by day thing again:

Monday: Pday! Pretty great pday. We had some Internet struggles but it was still nice to hear from everybody back home. After we internetted, we went back home, did some wash, and then we made a cake in the microwave since we don't have an oven. Not necessarily proud of it, but it was pretty good given the circumstances. Then we drove up to Banana and we played frisbee on the beach for a while! Really fun day. For dinner, we went to our investigator's house for a surprise birthday party- for Mom! I told them last Friday it was Mom's birthday. Thy had set a dinner with us a while back, but they changed it around a little and we showed up and there was a super delicious cake and all kinds of food. They are awesome investigators- Bwateriki (Patrick) and his wife Teburea. They'll be baptized this Saturday. 

Tuesday: Really draining day, busy in a lot of ways that are hard to measure. We only taught two lessons, but essentially we spent 6 hours finding referrals, contacting houses and tracting. Busy. We had a lot of great investigators, but they're all so great that they'll be baptized really soon and then we'll be out of people again!  It was tough, a lot of the referrals weren't around or anything so it was a frustrating day. But I think the success was that we left the house at 10:30 and didn't come back til 9, even though we really, really were tired and bored. Tuesday night we had a farewell party for Ueata, the first investigator I ever baptized. He has been here on Christmas away from his family for 20 years running the airport. He's finally retiring and going back to Tarawa, and it was great to have a little party with him before he left. Great guy!

Wednesday: Another crazy day. This week, 2 elders from our district have been gone on Fanning Island, Christmas's outer island. There's a branch out there, but no runway for planes and a normal small boat can't make it. So every 4 months the elders catch a ride out and back on the cargo boat that comes from Honolulu to just check up on the branch and stuff. Anyway, while they were doing that, we had to run their area here on Christmas, in addition to our own. So Wednesday morning we skipped studies and worked from 9-1 in Tabwakea, and 1-7 in our own area. Lots of lessons, lots of people we got to visit. Way busy, way exhausting and really fun too. At 7 we got to go to a huge party at our Branch President's house, for his daughter Taakenteiti. She turned 13 so she's a woman now I guess. Anyways there was tons of food and it was awesome!

Thursday: Same busy day, working Tabwakea in the morning and then working London the rest of the day. Busyness! But afterwards, we went to dinner at Nakala's house. Nakala and his family were basically my family when I was here the first time around. I really love them, and it was awesome to see them again. 

Friday: Same busyness, but we had lots of extra stuff to do to prep for our baptism. I'm running out of steam on this email. 

Saturday: Really great day! We had lessons in the morning, and our baptism at 5! Two of our favorite investigators got baptized. Tawataake is a 13 year old girl who just decided to come to church on her own and has been super faithful throughout the whole lessons. She's super goofy, but really smart too. Our other investigator is named Timon. He's a stud. He has a mental disability a little bit, but he really, really focused during our lessons and would always memorize a kind of 1 sentence main point, and he never forgot it. Really cool guy. He's buff too, because he works on the fishing boats. Their baptism was great. Unfortunately, no one came :( just us, these two, and our branch mission leader - but still, it was really awesome. We did it in the ocean, and the tide was out so Elder Sion kneeled and the baptizees just sat and then laid down hahaha!  It was too funny. Timon tried to go forward, and we had to do it a couple times for him to finally get all the way under water haha. When we came back from the ocean, Bwateriki and Teburea were there! They were really late, but they were still there. Great investigators. Since it was only us 7, we just had a tiny testimony meeting after everyone had showered and cleaned up. It was awesome to hear such pure simple testimonies from all 4 of our investigators, and I was really proud of them all. Afterwards, we had a GIGANTIC farewell party for the Andersons in the chapel. Like, probably 160 people showed up. There was so much food, like a whole pig and everything. Afterwards there was all kinds of cultural dances and stuff for the Anderson's from every auxiliary in the branch. Tawataake danced with the YW, and Timon with the YSA. Believe it or not, me and Sion danced with the Elders Quorum. It was so funny. Sister Anderson did a lot of crying. They sure are loved and they really will be missed. 

Sunday: We had an awesome time at church. On the way though, my bike got broken, but some random drunk guy happened to be walking with a wrench, so he helped us fix it. He also said he would fix his life, which was hilarious. He used the bike in a huge extended metaphor for himself hahaha! Afterwards, we had 11 investigators at church! And we have plans for all of them to be baptized in the next 3 weeks or so. Really awesome. 

Fantastic week, I love the area here, I love Elder Sion, I love the work, and I love all of you back home!

I Found Two Pictures!

I found these two pictures on another missionary's blog.  Dallin hasn't sent home any pictures in months, so I'll take what I can get :)  There are no haircuts on outer islands, so when they come in to Tarawa for transfers they get their hair buzzed.  I don't know if I have ever seen him with such short hair!  It's sad that I am excited to post a picture of him photo-bombing the other missionary :)

Letter to Grammy

Our emailing with Dallin was really choppy this week.  Due to the time change he emailed just as sacrament meeting was ending and I was trying to respond occasionally while teaching my class - didn't work well.  He also kept getting kicked off the internet and there were long gaps in response.  We finally got a little bit of information from him and my mom forwarded a letter she received this week.  Dallin is close with all his grandparents, but he has a very special relationship with Grammy.  Here's are parts of that letter:

Hi Gram! So great to hear from you :) I sure do love you! Thanks so much for your email. It's always nice to catch a little update on home. 

I am doing fantastic! Thank you so much for your prayers and love and concern. We have a funny joke in our family that if we really want or need something to happen, all we have to do is ask Grammy to pray for it. Usually we just are joking around about a test or a game or something, but I really do hope you know I can feel your prayers even all the way out here. You are such an example of faith and I am so grateful to be a blessed beneficiary. 

I'll just take a little time to respond to some of your email: First of all, I am SO glad you got to meet Kalani! She's something special for sure. I'm also so glad you had fun with Justy at BYU. It's such a different kind of place to be, hopefully Justin is excited about potentially heading there. I also loved General Conference! It was quite an experience to watch it in the Kiribati translation, but it was a real testimony that the message and spirit are always the same regardless of how obscure the language is. 

Great to hear that Ben is having fun in Uruguay still! I certainly feel for him- having a struggling branch that is dependent is tough. It'll be a great experience for him though! I'm lucky right now, for the first time in my mission we have an absolutely fantastic branch. Nice little break :) 

So awesome to hear about all of busyness you and Papa are up to! You guys sure are staying active. I am sure that the stake is so grateful for your help and leadership. More than that, I bet the storehouse is so grateful to have such helpful volunteers who are very well experienced. I am also quite jealous of those good temple construction workers who get cookies from you each week! That must be a treat for them I'm sure :)

I am so happy to have gotten your email! I know you're busy, and it's great to hear from you. I'm sorry I'm not as good about responding as I should be, but I do hope you know an email from you always brings a smile to my face. Love ya Gram! Have a fantastic week. 

Love Dal

*Here is a little from our email:

I'm good. Good busy week. We had a lot of work and it was fun.  8 baptisms these next three weeks, and pres is coming to visit the 3rd of December and new senior couple comes next Wednesday, Anderson's leave the 26th. Also on the 26th we get two more elders - we'll be a district of 8 elders aka the most fun district on the mission! So that's exciting.

About our investigators... we are pretty well rounded.  One girl in primary, her brother in young men's, 3 girls in young women's, 3 guys in elders quorum, 1 relief society woman. Pretty well split from tracting and referrals. One of them is a couple and that's always good. 

We got the house, we'll move in this week sometime. New house is awesome. It's pretty big, has a second story even. We will sleep upstairs because it's cold. House is right on the beach and has an awesome wind, so we shouldn't ever be hot. Does have electricity. Not using the solar panel as much anymore, but it is still good to have since I'll most likely head back out sometime. Food is great on Christmas. Lots of good stuff. I'm liking Christmas a lot more the second time around. Sion is the man and our area is awesome. 

On a sad note, the missionary who was upset about us taking over the area left for SLC Wednesday. (See previous week for explanation) It was really hard. The missionary spent Tuesday in London visiting people and telling them I was a terrible elder. Honestly, it made me more sad than irritated, which is a sign of the mission changing me. I imagine (blank) is really sad, and I guess if (blank) needs to take that out by blaming me that's okay. I'm fine. All the members asked me about it on Sunday. Thankfully most of them said something like, we think you work hard, or we don't really believe that. So that was encouraging. It was rough. I don't really get it to be honest. 

*That was all we got before being cut off again, but it sounds like he is happy and healthy and doing great.  I'm grateful that he has another chance on Christmas Island while healthy to enjoy the people and the experience.  It's amazing how different a place can seem based on your situation and perspective :)

Reaching Goals - Little by Little!

Hi Family!

It has been a CRAZY, CRAZY week!

Amazingly, we have been blessed with some AMAZING successes! I'll start from the beginning: President gave us a goal before we came here. 15 baptisms before Jan 1st.  In the past 4 months they've had 6, but President said that he fully expected us to be able to perform. So 15 has been burned into our minds and our planners. We went from 0 investigators last Monday to 14 this Monday. Moreover, 8 came to church after just a week of lessons. We're totally changing our styles- its new for both of us. We visit all of our people every day, and teach little bits in depth. Every lesson focuses on the gospel, and drawing nearer to Christ through our actions and such. We essentially are on track to hit 14 baptisms between now and the end of the month. Which will give us another whole month to smash President's goal. We're so excited. I LOVE teaching with Sion. We just get such
great flow and I can really see the results in our people's lives. it's amazing. We got 7 people just from tracting and we got the rest from referrals. it's awesome. We're hoping London doesn't get slowed down too much by us being in Tabwakea as well for the next few weeks. We're essentially working 3 branches. And, we only have bikes. We're going to ask President Anderson to let us use the car to make this feasible.

Best teaching experience: BANABA.

Banaba is the husband of a less active member named Friday (yes, literally). He's shy. Like, debilitatingly shy. But he's a great guy. We just had been talking with him for a long time while trying to reactivate his wife. Sisters told us he was a waste of time, but he actually started to open up to us. We finally set a time with him! And he ran away. But we reset it with his wife. He ran away from that one too. But, we reset it a third time and we finally got him! We had an AWESOME lesson. We just essentially asked him why he thought we were there, why we were so persistent about wanting to sit down with him. We explained that we wanted him to be happy and blessed and we had the gospel and that we knew that if he had the gospel he could be happy too. It went amazingly- we both said it was the best lesson we've ever given. Specifically because it was EXACTLY what he needed, not a lesson from the book. We've had two lessons since on the restoration and the Book of Mormon. He's awesome. Great questions and very willing to pray and read. He's the man. So is Sion, it's great to have
a companion I can count on to say the right thing at the right time.

Every time we come out of a lesson with him we both are just exhausted. It's hard to teach like that, we're like on top of our game for 40 minutes straight, and we've done it 3 times in a row. It's crazy and it would be impossible on our own for sure. But I'm so happy it's working.

(Ed commented that it was a unique approach to teach a very small amount each day) It's going so well; neither of us has ever taught investigators every day. It makes it way more flexible. We still have had time for tracting and contacting. So essentially we've just been machines this week. We don't have to do 12 weeks studies or anything so we leave the house between 10:30 and 11:00 and we work up until dinner at 7:00. It's so
fulfilling. 

(How are you studying language right now?) We study language mostly in reading the Book of Mormon and just talking to people. I haven't come up with anything organized other than reading and getting back into the habit of writing words down. Gospel study is one chapter in the Book of Mormon, then I kind of figure out lessons for our
people, from PMG or wherever else is applicable for the day.

A lot of the craziness this week had to do with a very delicate situation.  You know how we took over______'s area? London? Well it became dramatic. One of the missionaries who we just took over for happens to be one of the missionaries I took over Abaiang from. So _______ made it abundantly clear that _____ is angry at me and Elder Sion. Then in district meeting on Thursday I really messed up - I mentioned just casually as a part of our area update section that we had dropped a few people. ______ asked who it was and when I said their names ___ started freaking out and stuff about how they were good and it was CRAZY. Then ______ left district meeting, went straight to the Andersons house and slammed the door. _____ QUIT THEIR MISSION. _____ was finishing in December and just decided to go home. It was so weird. So _____ is flying to America on Wednesday, and the companion is going to Tarawa.

To make matters worse, Elder Tarati and Elder Ward, (one from Tabwakea 2 and one from banana) are going to visit Fanning, Christmas' outer Island. They'll be gone for two weeks. So essentially, we're left with 4 missionaries to cover 4 branches. Me and Sion are going to work all of Tabwakea ( my old area) and London until President can save us. Banana is going to be worked by Smith and Aru, who are both out like 2.5 months. It's an ABSOLUTE mess. But, if we weren't here right now, the island would essentially shut down for two weeks. On top of that, the Andersons have 3 weeks left. CRAZY!

(We asked why Kiribati missionary numbers seem to be declining.) It's the end of the surge I think. The big wave is all going home now, and it's not being replaced as efficiently. Only one comes in November and 3 leave, only 5 in December and 7 leave. We're going to be stretched pretty thin. President just replied, he told me he still hasn't even gotten word back from the area presidency on his original request to open Nikunau. He also gave us the instruction to focus on our own goals in London and to just "hold down the fort" in Tabwakea. It's gonna be a big change for the rest of us who stay behind.  This mission especially. We only have half a missions's worth of elders in Kiribati anyways, and we have 26 on outies, plus 6 here, 8 as dl's and companions on Tarawa, 4 zl's, and one ap. there's only one spare companionship of elders on Tarawa right now, so I have no idea what president is going to do. 

(We told him a little about what we were doing in Barcelona.) Sounds like Barcelona is so fun! Speaking of Spanish, Elder Sion is obviously fluent. His family speaks Spanish at home. But he got to talk to one of the workers on the big fishing boats in Spanish and it was so fun to listen. I understood everything they said, I remembered all the words and stuff. I could not for the life of me make my brain put it together in any logical way to speak it. I just spoke Kiribati haha it was funny though. Hopefully you're remembering the promise to not have
too much fun while you're there.

So excited to be here. Next few weeks will be exhausting. Hopefully it will work of alright! I love you all, thanks for the prayers. Thanks for staying up so late too! Have a fun time in Spain :) talk to you all next week! 

Love Dal