Week 58, October 24, 2016

Bula Re na wekaqu,

Isa, it's been a while. So these past few weeks have been crazy. I'll try and fill you all in. So, yeah I got a new companion. Elda Dunn (Las Vegas, Nevada), my boy from the MTC. It's been good having him up in the mountain man area with me.

 Two-ish weeks ago we had the awesome opportunity to baptize our home boy Simi! It was an awesome experience. I got to do the baptism in the river, the same river we bathe in haha. It went really well, no hiccups or anything.  We also got to baptize a beautiful little girl named Una!

Simi's baptism

Una's baptism

So lately the work in the area had been a little slow. Just for the common man's information, missionaries usually set trends in area, ways of doing things. Sometimes it great, others...not so much. Nakawakawa had been struggling a bit. Elda Dunn and I decided to revamp the area. No more old habits. We started focusing our efforts more outward to other koros, other than just focusing on Nakawakawa koro itself. The work, started off slow, but as of late has really been picking up!  What's really been kicking things up is our class at the secondary school (high school). 

Teaching at the Secondary School

We teach tons of these awesome kids. We are like their cool white guy friends. We teach them things about the church and about the Savior and they give us mangoes and stuff. Lately I've been teaching some American slang, like "Sup dude", "that's rad", it's really funny walking by the school and just hearing a bunch of Fijian teenagers say "Sup dude!?" we usually just answer "yo, bula sa rai mada va oqo" ("we are going this way"). They just respond "that's rad". It's way crack up. They are some of the coolest people I've ever met. 

Our awesome class!

Isa, so I want to explain a little bit about our bathing situation, just because it's something not a lot of missionaries get to do. So this is usually how it goes. We will be sitting in our flat, doing studies, drinking breakfast or something of that nature. As we sit in our little cozy cabin in the mountains of Fiji, a smell starts to rise towards our noses. It starts as a tickle, then quickly overwhelms our poor noses with the stench of dirty man. As we wipe the tears from our eyes, one of us will usually say, "Hey dude, do you want to go bathe?" which is usually followed with a very quick, "PLEASE!" We grab our bathing clothes which is just a pair of basketball shorts or something and we drive down to our cute little river. We walk a small trail down to a drop off, protruding out of said drop off is a large log. We both take off our shoes and shirts and climb onto the log. It doesn't matter how hot, or cold, or sunny, or rainy, we have to embrace the suck-all-at-once and jump into the river. It's usually much colder than we anticipate. We swim, oh wait, I mean we "bathe" over to our rock that we stand on to soap up on and we just jump back into the water to rinse all the soap off at once. Sometimes we bathe in like 5 minutes, sometimes it takes longer for us the "bathe" back to shore. The experience never fails to surprise me though. Last time we saw two of our branch members butchering a cow in the river just down stream from us. So sanitary, and people wonder why we always get boils or rashes or stuff like that. It's all part of that bush life though. 

Have I mentioned yet how much I love the people out here?  The kids...I love how fun the kids are!  They love American candy and I always try to have something to pass out to them.  I got a bunch of super sour War Heads in a package from home and it's been a blast to watch the kids try and eat them!

Kai colo kids

Their swimming pool.

Bum jump!

Elda Dunn and his squad

Gunuqu mango

So this is Pasemaca (on the left) or "Sister Dawson." She saw a picture of Spencer and wants to marry him now. 

Some kids from the koro

My little squad of bush killas

I'm having lots of fun out here. It's great to be a missionary. I love you all tons. Talk to you guys in like two months. #skypeatchristmas  #timeflies   

Elda Dawson

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Peace Be Still

Keep it Real