September 9th, 2013

Hello everyone,

Well there once was a place where it never rained...the end. 

Tuvalu gets all its water from the rain and it hasn't rained here for like 3 weeks so our flat ran out of water Saturday night, so i took a shower with a water bottle i had filled up previously....i didn't feel clean haha. We decided to go to church early and use the shower there and it didn't work. 7:00 in the morning contemplating on what to do, my comp and I decided the lagoon was the only choice. So we took a table cloth, cut it in half, wrapped ourselves up and bathed in the ocean. It was awesome and really weird and I still didn't feel clean. Don't worry we didn't break any rules, it's allowed if we run out of water. They got the shower at the church to work so last night and probably for a few more days we'll be sleeping on the floor on mats in the church. The island is great. this week was slow because there were a lot of funerals and when that happens on the south pacific, all Polynesians drop what they're doing and its like a week event. We have great investigators right now but they all have the same problem: smoking, and we don't know what to do. But the language is coming more and more every week its just gonna take time and dilligent study.We have a baptism next week of this 14 year old kid who's the man. We're also teaching these two ladies who are on like a search for religious truth so they're studying all these religions and we are the "scholars" as she puts it that they want to hear mormonism from. They started like questioning us and the first question they asked was about the BoM and how revelations says not to add to this book. So i explained to them the verse and how John was on an island and that he was talking about his book, revelations. She then pulled out a Jehovah's Wittness magazine saying that the LDS church teaches that the soul will never die which is true, its eternal. But this ex-mormon in this magazine was saying that in ezekiel the soul dies. So i asked her to turn to the verse and the guy had totally butchered the verse for his own cause and she saw that and was like oh the soul that "sinneth" dies. I explained that through the atonement and repentance we can be clean and saved from spiritual death. She was like thanks we really learned a lot today, so hopefully we can start actually teaching them the lessons soon. We also had a great lesson with an investigator Melton who had problems with the BoM because he said the Bible doesn't talk about the BoM, so we shared with him John 10:16 about other sheep and Ezekiel 37 about the stick of judah and Joseph, and finished the lesson with Elder Hollands testimony of the BoM, Melton told us he knew it was true after the lesson.  Anyways love you guys and i hope you're doing well. I'm working hard and trying to survive haha. 

love

Elder Cashen