29 - United States of Awesomeness

Hey mom! Well first off, if you looked at the pictures first you know about the baptism. If not, now you know.

The isla is going great! I wish I had perfect Utah weather here, the weather here is crazy. It gets super hot, then the next day it's cold. And it's to the point of where I need to use my sheet sometimes. So my body temperature is off. There's no way I can be getting cold out here! I'm kind of curious to see how long it takes for packages to get here. But I won't really know if it gets to Panama or not. That's one of the drawbacks of living here on the island.

That's awesome about the cows. I kinda miss farm work. It's weird to think about missing it, but I do. I liked doing it, especially with Austin. It's crazy to think that we are so far away from each other speaking different languages, but doing the same thing.

That's super funny that you guys had to speak in Sacrament Meeting. I honestly don't remember the last time you two had given talks in Sacrament! You punks! Trying to get out of it! haha just kidding. I would do the same.

Our lessons are going good. We are actually doing mission prep classes right now. We have an 18 year old guy and a 20 year old girl. The district president says they have to have all the mission prep classes before they can do their papers. So what we did is we talked about the first 4 chapters of the book, they are about being called of God and personal worthiness. Then 3 and 4 are about the spirit. Then all the other ones are parts of the lessons we teach as missionaries. So now we just teach them the lessons as if they were investigators and then they try and teach it back to us. We teach them like the full-length huge versions of the lesson, which takes like 45 minutes and then we tell them to teach like 10 minute to 15 minute versions of it. So it's actually kind of fun, and it helps to have a missionary teach it I think. We live this every day, so we kinda know what we are doing with it. But it's pretty fun, we have a good time with it. They both really wanna serve in the United States of Awesomness (new name I decided on). I told them like what kind of food we eat there, and that we have running hot and cold water coming from every faucet, just things like that. Then we made them some Gatorade, because in America, we drink greatness. So therefore we decided Gatorade was American enough to be an example. The hermanas on another island have some kids that want to serve missions too, but they are going to teach them. 

For my studies lately, I have been studying the life of Jesus, and his attributes. In Preach My Gospel there is a whole chapter about the attributes of Christ. So that’s pretty good! But my studies are kind of everywhere because I have to study so much! But I’ll start writing things down to share with you.

Travel is super common, especially for elders, because my comp is the district leader. So we have to go on divisions with the hermanas every change. But we almost always take water taxi kind of things. It’s actually kind of fun! We like look at motor size on the boats all the time. There’s a few boats called the Iguana, there are like 3 of them. They all have two 115 engines. It’s crazy! Those things are fast! But nothing compared to the boat back home. I kinda miss that thing. 

I remember doing all that stake youth committee stuff. I actually kind of liked it. It wasn’t even bad! But I guess I had a different view of it. Tell her to stop complaining. There are some places where kids can’t even get to church. So at least she can get to a church. Or do what I did, just go home in between meetings! haha no I never did that! Only right after sacrament to grab some food but that’s it! 

 

But I hope Marcus doesn’t get married before I get back. I wanna do some fun things with him before then! There are so many things to do! But dang I remember Sweet Tomatoes! It was freaking awesome! I remember going to the little bar with all the pizza and loadin my plate up with that! I loved that part! Maybe even as much at the ice cream. I’m so going there after the mission! That place rocks! But make sure to buy the new transformers movie and any other good movies that come out. I wanna see them when I get back! 

Our mission president sends out a letter every week to all the missionaries and we have to write to him every week. If you are lucky, he will write you back. Well it could be super lucky, or super unlucky if he does, depending on what it’s for. I actually did go to that conference too but I just wasn’t in any pictures. That was out in Playon Chico, and their bridge isn’t as cool as ours. Theirs is a little longer, but ours is taller, wider, and nicer. We gave up on our dreams of being expert fishermen. It was too much time invested. But we actually never really worry about food. We buy more food out here on the island than we get from the city. From the city is only like special things we couldn’t get out here and drink mixes. 

But this week was pretty crazy. We had a seminary graduation. It was with us, Carti Tupile and Tikantiki. So Thursday and Friday me and my comp were getting ready for that. Just so you know, pretty much the ward works through the missionaries. They always ask us to help with everything that ever happens. Without missionaries a lot would be undone. So we had to work on that for pretty much 2 days. Then Saturday morning at 8 am. we had a baptism. It was just me, my comp, the district president, and the Milmer. Small crowd for that one. but it was ok. He is the kind of kid that doesn’t really care about things like that so it worked out fine. I felt like those first missionaries how they would just kinda take the person to the nearest river and get it done! So that was pretty cool.  Then we had the other islands show up so there were kids everywhere. We had the seminary graduation and it was pretty fun. We got nachos after and I was in heaven. I missed liquid cheese! But it was a good time. We didn’t get much sleep though. Our hammocks take up almost the whole room where we sleep and we had to throw 4 more people in the open spaces we had. There wasn’t hardly any room in here! We were kinda crammed. On Sunday we were exhausted. We went to a member’s house for some lunch. It was super good! It was rice and chicken and carrots. Dang I miss those carrots! That was my week. Not much, but at the same time a lot of stuff went on. 

But other than that not much is happening, just some teaching. We have movie night with our youth. Me and my comp go to see the Columbians and buy Disney movies and then we all watch them on Fridays. Then Saturday mornings we are starting a thing where we play sports in the morning. So we do a lot of work with the jovenes.

I hope things are going good in the hood. Keep Brooke in line and Marcus away from thoughts of marriage! Love you!