August 14th, 2013

Hello!

This week has been great and kinda weird. Tomorrow we leave for Fiji for two weeks for Zone Conference and the cool thing about flying to and from Tuvalu is that you are told when you are leaving and when you are coming back. So when i leave Fiji to come back here, I'll know when i'm going back to Fiji the next time. 

This week we got a referral for these two ladies who wanted to be taught in English and they said they had been everywhere searching for the right church. So we gave them an intro lesson and a Book of Mormon and scheduled to come back. When we came back they had a lot of questions about the Book of Mormon and about Joseph Smith and we gave an awesome lesson on the truthfullness of the book and the calling of Joseph Smith to be a prophet. It was awesome and they both were so interested. We told them to follow the example of Joseph Smith and pray about the Book of Mormon and they will know of its truthfullness and also Joseph Smith being a true prophet. Ruby (one of the girls) is very sincere and curious and she asked about the scripture in Rev. about not adding to this book and i pulled out all these scriptures how that is a misinterpretation of that scripture and helped her understand, man the spirit really helped us in the lesson.

 We are continuing to help two of our investigators stop smoking, and it amazes me that a 19 year old kid is giving this guy advice on how to stop smoking but i know that it is really the spirit and the gospel that will help this man.

 I baptized this great investigator in the lagoon yesterday and it was so cool to see her bare her testimony, even though i couldn't understand it, i know the spirit was there. 

Something hard though is that a lot of people like the past elders and you have to gain their trust and respect, i've had some people tell me to go back to Fiji and let the other elder come back haha, it tough and my comp is a cool guy but he hates the people here so that doesn't help, he gets angry cause they tease him, i tell him just let it roll off your back man who cares. 

We don't have hot water, which is okay because Tuvalu is freakin hot! And comfy bed...not really, i'm so tired by the end of the day it doesn't matter haha, the mattress is so thin i can feel the wood planks of the bed frame beneath haha. And our house is nice, but its disgusting, the elders from the past have just destroyed it and its just super dirty and nasty. We rely on rain water for everything so if no rain water, SOL my friend, here i come ocean. And our sink doesn't work so we fill a bucket up with water, put it in the sink and pump the water out to purify it haha. 

Anyways the work is great and still trying to learn this new language.

Love ya,

Elder Henry Cashen