This past week was crazy so
we didn't really get much work done. Monday was zone conference. Tuesday was p-day. Wednesday we have a Book of Mormon study class and correlation. Thursday we have weekly planning. Friday was our only whole day. Saturday and Sunday we had conference. Yesterday was a holiday so there was a branch activity and today was p-day again.
Things are good here in St. Lucia. I don't, however, know what happened to Baby last week. She wasn't there this week either though. There wasn't much support for trying to get General Conference set up for the Branch to see (for the first time) now that we have an Internet line into the building. This has caused some tension between the missionaries and our Branch President (President Nicholas) but I'm not too frustrated, I just know how things should be done and I try and do it! We ended getting to see most of conference on the Senior Couples laptop computer but when we tried to project it so everyone could watch the Sunday sessions at the Branch, the transformer fried and the router died! Perhaps 6 months from now...
General conference was pretty good. I found it very interesting that the most talked about things were: 1) Raising children to be built upon a firm foundation and 2) Receiving personal revelation. I also thought it interesting what Ballard said about his last 3 conference talks. I liked hearing President Monson say the same thing about the Priesthood session that Dad did. (The best Priesthood Meeting he had ever attended!)
Transfers are next week, on Wednesday. I should be getting a phone call from the Mission President this weekend! I hope that I get to go to the North side of the island with Elder Prince. As I probably told you, he is our zone leader and the one that played hockey for Weber State before his mission. I did want to go to St. Vincent but I really don't want take any more flights! I just have a lot of stuff to haul around! I guess i could start dumping stuff though since I am almost done!
About letters, go ahead and continue to send them to the mission office, until the start of May. Before returning home, I will stop in Trinidad on the way home and I can collect any pieces of mail there.
The scripture of the week is
Ether 12:26-27.
Here are some recent photos from the Senior Couples' Blog:
Bonus Material:Amanda apparently e-mailed some questions to Jonathan about missionary work and she received some very interesting audio clips back from him. Here are the transcipts of these recordings:
Is it was hard to talk to people just randomly on the street? Ummm, I told you that it can be sometimes, especially when you’re new because you don’t really know how people are going to respond, you might not know the language or the lingo that people use, and so when you first start out, gosh, you have no idea whats going on. Anyway, the first time I ever had to contact people, that’s what we call it is contacting, was in Guyana, with my trainer, Elder Hamilton, and we were in a little village called Adelphine. It is pretty much a ghetto in Guyana, which is a ghetto country. Anyway, so we’re down in Adelphine walking across this bridge, and there are these four drunk dudes all sitting on this bridge… didn’t know they were drunk. But, they were on the only bridge that lead to the little… well, I guess you can call it a neighborhood… the neighborhood that we were trying to go to. And so we were coming to the bridge and Elder Hamilton is like “Hey, contact these guys”. And I was like “awe, dang, are you kidding me?”. So, I went onto the bridge and I introduced myself, I said, “Hey fellas, I’m Elder Larson”. I went around and shook all their hands, and got their names, which is important, you have to ask their name. Then I asked them a little bit about themselves, you know, like what they do for work or if they have family, things like that. From there, you basically have to ask people questions to get them thinking about the gospel or about God in some way or another. Now in this particular case, I can’t remember what I asked them about, probably their families, and if they wanted to be with their families forever. That’s a good one to talk about with people, especially here. So, I asked them about that, and, well, they were drunk. It didn’t go so well, they were nice to me! Three of them were Muslim and one of them doesn’t believe in God at all. So, they weren’t very nice to me because I’m white, I was an infidel according to the three Muslims, and they just didn’t want to have anything to do with me. That’s alright. It happens. But, I have learned from then on to not really care what people say about me. It has been wonderful. It is a skill that I am glad that I have acquired as a missionary. Because there are lots of people, especially here in St Lucia, man, this place is so racist. They say all kinds of bad stuff, but we just ignore them and just kind of walk on and life goes on, whatever, we don’t even think about it. A typical contact is usually like “Hey, how’s it going? I’m Elder Larson, and this is my companion, Elder Barker, whats your name, boss?”. Boss, is a typical term here, it is kind of just like a term of respect. And they say what their name is. And you’re like “Oh, sweet, well”, whatever their name is, say it is Danny… well that is a terrible name actually, no one here is named Danny, how about… well… gosh… how about Curtis? Curtis is a popular name here in St Lucia. “Hey Curtis, do you believe in God?” to just kind of start things off. And he says “Yeah, I believe in God”. Then you say “Cool, well, do you read your bible?” and he says “Of course I do”! Then you ask, “Do you know who wrote the bible?” Then you have to explain to them, “The bible was written by prophets, people that spoke to God and helped to teach the world his word. And they wrote down what they learned from God so that we can all benefit from it. That’s how we got the bible”. And usually they say “oh that’s pretty sweet”. And then we say “Hey, would it be important to you if there was more scripture that could help us get even closer to God?” Usually they say “Yeah, that’d be great”. And we say “Well, we share that there is another book that was brought to the earth by a prophet of God named Joseph Smith”. We testify about the Book of Mormon and how we know that it is true. Then we say “Well, what we’d like to do is we’d like to come and teach you about this book, how it came about, and how it can help you and your family get closer to God. When would be a good day that we could come and see you?” Finally we set up an appointment, and get their phone number. The phone number is key, and address. So once we have an appointment, name, and phone number then we tell them to have a good day and we walk on. Contacting really isn’t that difficult! Contacting really isn’t all that bad, you just have to do it. Just buckle down and be bold. That’s the key. Open your mouth. That’s an interesting thing. Go do a study, open your scriptures, not right now, but later, so open your scriptures, especially D&C and search for the terms “open your mouth”. It is in there a bunch. And then read all of the promised blessings that come when you open your mouth. Because it mentions it in there at least a dozen times, I swear. So its pretty sweet!
Now I’m standing outside on our porch and every once in a while you hear this goat in the back ground, its really kind of annoying. But that’s what we’ve got to deal with. Anyways, its been raining a lot the last couple of days, at night at least, not in the actual day, which sucks. So its good, we really need rain badly. Its even drying than Utah here right now. Anyway, I want to tell you about a couple other things that are unsual that we’ve done today. Today started out with Elder Barker trying to cook an egg yoke in the microwave. Now, frying an egg in the microwave is something that I have become very good at. Just like when you’re making scrambled eggs, you mix it all together, stick it in the microwave for about 20 seconds, pull it out and stir it up while its only a little hard, put it in for another 15 to 20 seconds, and it comes out, and it’s a perfectly round thing of fried eggs. Anyway, Elder Barker decided to try that, but with just the egg yoke. And he decided to try and boil it. So he sticks it in the, and when he pulls it out, the yoke is hard, and he decides to poke it with a fork. Well, as you can probably imagine, when you poke something that’s hot, it didn’t like it too much… in fact, the egg yoke exploded… hehehe… and shot water and pieces of yoke, all over our kitchen and all over Elder Barkers face. Hehehe… So he has got burns on both of his cheeks, his upper lip, and both of his eyelids. Hahaha… I’m sorry its not nice, but it is really funny. And we don’t have any burn cream. So he just has to suffer with it until we can find some aloe vera somewhere. But it’s pretty prevalent on the islands, so we should be able to find some in a ½ hour or so when we go looking. Anyway, that was one thing that was unusual today. The other one was that I think we have finally sunk to a new low, as far as breakfast food went. Since we only have powdered milk, and we’re sick of the same cereal, nobody wanted that, and that was the only breakfast food that we had, and Elder Barker used our last egg when it exploded on his face. So with no other breakfast foods, Elder Lundberg, the other Elder from Logan that is in our apartment, he decided to make some stuffing. Yes, a box of stove-top stuffing. Like what we have for Thanksgiving, except Mom does it really good, its real. Anyway, so we had stuffing for breakfast and it was unique. It was actually really good, I was quite surprised, it could have been because we were all hungry. But anyway that’s just kind of missionary life. You eat what you can, when you can. And you don’t complain about it.
Finally, there is an lady investigator who lives here in St Lucia in a village called Grace, and we went over there one time and she fed us some flying fish that was terrible. She also made us kidneys. I don’t know what creatures the kidneys came from, but they were terrible. So avoid those if you can at all costs. Pretty much, if you get bad food you just kind of have to eat it and just try and act happy. With the kidney, the best thing was to just put some in your mouth and grab some cool-aid and swig it down. Yeah, that is how I survived. The flying fish actually wasn’t too bad, it wasn’t too fishy, but, still not great.
