September 22nd, 2013

Talofa

This week on my island was tough. Trying to figure out our house and every lesson falling through sucked real bad. But we had a lot of cool experiences. We went to a restaurant for dinner and there was a wedding reception going on so we were about to leave when the family asked us to stay and eat with them. So they brought us into the room where it was just the bride and groom and close friends and we ate with them haha. Then they asked my comp to speak haha and he talked about the importance of the family it was awesome. We crashed a wedding and my comp spoke at it and we didn't even know the people. After we went to a fa'atele that Pres. Niko invited us to and man it was awesome. They did all these dances and songs. Tuvalu is a lot like Samoa, its a Polynesian country and has a lot of things common throughout the Polynesian islands where as Fiji is Melanesian and a lot different from like Tonga and Samoa. So i get to experience all this cool stuff. We also had a great baptism on Saturday, the guy is the man. Yesterday we went to visit a sister in the hospital and she has cancer and we found out yesterday that she only has like four months to live and she just hit her 3 month mark. She is such a strong member and is so sad cause her family is less active. She started crying and was like all i want, is to see the temple and have my family sealed. Freak! I started crying. Families are so important and its important that no matter what we keep a good relationship with all of them. And also what a special and important place the temple is, don't take it for granted, go as much as you can. 

Love ya guys

(excerpt from Hank's letter to Jaimie)

Ya living conditions pretty much suck here haha, you'd puke if you saw our house. We pump water out of a bucket that we fill up from the tap outside our house and in the bucket are all these nasty little worms swimming around. I've just gotten use to it though haha. After an elder comes off Tuvalu he's usually made a Zone Leader pretty quickly and zls always have nice flats.  Thanks for writing me, life is tough out here on the streets haha. Alofa ki a koe

Elder Henry Cashen

September 15th, 2013

This week has been tough, with the lack of water and living in a different house and then having storms hit us, we're trying to survive haha. We're still roughing it in at the church. I'm sleeping on a mat in the church. Hopefully we get water this   week, the whole living situation sucks here in Tuvalu, we want a new flat. This week was pretty dull, its getting close to cyclone season so we've had a lot of strong wind and lots of rain, which we're trying to work around. 

On Saturday we had a great baptism of this 14 yr old kid named Akatasa. He's the man, and for a 14 year old kid he really had an awesome understanding of the Gospel.

We have another baptism this Saturday of a guy named Ukasi who is also the man and will be a great addition to the priesthood here in Tuvalu. We have a girl we are teaching named Emma. She's a great investigator but she wants to get baptized with her husband who is in Fiji. She came to church yesterday and after talking to her and finding out some of her problems we offered her a blessing which she accepted. My comp anointed her and i gave the blessing and afterwards she was wiping tears from her eyes. The priesthood and priesthood power are real. Teaching the gospel is fun and hard but its always worth it seeing the effects of your work and service. Being on a mission you see that no one is perfect and that every family has their problems. Its important for missionaries to be there to help and be that love that people need but its also important for members to show their love and not judge or gossip. Oh ya, as you know i love cats. And here in the islands people treat dogs and cats like crap. So this morning while we were doing our studies this kid picked up his kitten and was like using it as a toy airplane, and like swooping it down on these big dogs who were hitting it. So after watching this for like five minutes i got up and yelled at the kid to stop haha. My comp was like, man you really like cats haha. Anyways, Love ya guys and hope you're all doing well. 

Love 

Elder Cashen

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

August 25th, 2013

Hey everyone,

Right now, I'm in Suva. I've been here for the past week.

 We're staying with the Suva ZLs who are really cool guys and one of them served in Tuvalu as well so its been cool talking to him about it. I've had to switch back to Fijian and man i miss it. The ZLs both told me i was good, all these fijian we visited in the city were surprised with my fijian, hopefully that will be the same with Tuvaluan. Its funny because when you go into a house there are like mannerisms and things that fijians do that i've picked up pretty well and i went out with a different elder who goes home pretty soon and he was so surprised and the people in the house loved it haha. Like i asked where they are from and they said Tailevu North, and i was like oh vinaka tai, au mai tailevu south (where i started) and we knew the villages we were both from haha. I guess you'd have to be here to understand. I miss FIJI and fijians. I had mcdonalds for the first time here as well which was a nice change haha. There is also this big festival here called Hibiscus and part of it is like a beauty pageant and i met the winner last night, we went to a less actives house and her daughter was the winner, me and my ZL comp tried on her crown haha. Its awesome here. We have Zone conference tomorrow and then we go back to tuvalu on thursday. I bought a tennis raquet to play tennis with my comp in Tuvalu. Other than that we are workin! I've met some awesome people in Suva, we met three people who were like "I have always prayed that one day you people would come to visit me" and one lady was like "when you two came into the house, i felt like a light went on inside me". The gospel is true and its all of our responsibilty to share it but being a missionary is even cooler!

Love you guys,

Elder Cashen

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

August 11th, 2013

Talofa!

Tuvalu is the coolest, the only thing that sucks is learning a whole new language and i don't have the help of the mtc, luckily some past missionaries have written some study helps. Its awesome here because we are by ourselves and no one comes to check on us and we report to the APs, i'm happy because i feel like i don't have to impress other missionaries or mission leaders, i just gotta do the work i can up in Tuvalu. My new comp is the man, he's not the most obedient elder and pres sent him here because he was the only samoan that could go but he's the man, he's hilarious and i feel like i'm in an episode of summer heights high when i talk to him.  i'm working to learn the language which is a lot harder than fijian, working to get to know the members and gain their trust and working to find and teach people the gospel of Jesus Christ. Book of Mormon is awesome and true and Joseph Smith was and is a prophet of God! The work is going great here in Tuvalu, we have a baptism next week and my comp wants me to do it so i'll be baptizing in the lagoon! 

I'm still getting acquainted with the members here. 

At dinner last night, I ate this thing that i thought was potato salad but it did't taste like potato salad and i asked the member and he's like "oh, that's coconut cream onions and raw fish" haha it was really weird, i also ate lamb neck. 

This week, we ran into a white baptist pastor from Wisconsin who has moved to Tuvalu to start the church here (Illegally) We started talking, just small talk and then he started making these comments that were like subtly bashing the church, and he said, "I think if you make a prophecy, and its wrong, than you're a false prophet" and i said, "Well what did Joseph Smith prophecy that was false>?" and he said, "Well I'd have to go back and check" and i said, "well we'd love to come over and answer your quesitons if you want." and he's like "um ya, lets just put the bible down and discuss it" I think he wants to debate instead of answering questions so we'll see what happens.

We have a lot of people to teach but the tough thing here is that my comp is Samoan and Tuvaluans and Samoans don't get along and he hates a lot of people here so it turns people off. The white elders stay here so long that the people get attached to them and when the next one comes in, its tough for them to gain the respect of the people because they feel like you were only there cause the other white elder left, thats what some lady told me haha. Anyways i love you guys and love hearing about whats going on.

 as E. Leiataua says, "latahs."

Love, Elder Cashen

August 4th, 2013

I made it to Tuvalu! I don't understand a thing haha. Its not a different dialect, its a different language, its close to samoan, so I'm back to square one, but I'll learn it!  So, i'm just trying to get settled in with my new companion who is a Samoan from Australia.  He was in a Samoan gang and was telling me about his life and I said "you sound just like the guys from Green Street Hooligans" and he's like, "you've seen that!! Ya man that was my life." haha. 

Tuvalu isn't as ghetto as it may sound on the internet, it's still ghetto though haha but B E A utiful! It's like  Fiji but a lot more westernized, and a lot more like what you see in the movie The Other Side of Heaven. I'm still getting settled in and don't have a lot to report because I have no idea what is going on haha. Apparently all the elders who serve out here get to slaughter a pig so, hopefully ill get to do that haha. Not much to report other than its beautiful here and awesome.  We are on Funafuti and its super hot and soooooooo tempting to just run into the water and go swimming haha, don't worry i won't. We baptize people in the ocean here so hopefully i'll have the chance to do that. I'm working hard and need to work harder learning this new language.

Sorry this is short, i'm really tired and i got sick on my second day. I guess i'm not used to the food and threw it all up, my stomach is still recooperating. Its cool being here but quite a shock with the new language and new people, Elder smith, the one that leaves tomorrow told me the people here are his favorite out of his whole mission, which is good because ill be here for a long long long time.

ill send pics next week cause my card reader is in fiji. Love you guys and hope all is going great!

PO Box 40 Vaiaku Road Funafuti Tuvalu is the new mailing address