Monday 13 June 2016

Week 39 - Tarawa, Teaoraereke (Companion: Elder Smith (Canada))

Email dated: June 13, 2016

Was up!!

Gaia, so yeah first week in Teaoraereke! So much work here and not enough time! Really missing Temaiku and I haven't heard what's going on over there with the Sisters but I'm sure they picked up all our investigators fine. 

Yes, Me and my companion work as zone leaders together, my companion is Elder Smith (Canada) and he has been zone leader for a couple of months but he finishes his time in 10 days! so he's giving me a good run down on what I'll be taking over. Elder Smith is so cool, he was one of Elder Millers favourite companions so I had heard a lot about him. He is such a good worker and hasn't let the fact he's going home soon get to him.

Teaoraereke 2nd area is huge and is more populated then Temaiku, it so populated that you have to walk through peoples house to get to other peoples houses. Never in my life have I walked so much into the middle of people showering, especially older people, they just don't care who sees. Its not a pretty sight. There is so much work here as well, random members off the street will come up to us and have people they want us to teach, its ridiculous. What's sucks is that zone leaders are working this area so, as I said before, not enough time for all the work. 

Having a car helps, as not much time is wasted going from lesson to lesson, however missionary needs can take up a lot of time, especially with bike problems. So it's a little frustrating that we miss lessons but we are helping others areas get their work done. However the last couple of days have been really good, we have some Elders who just came back from outies (Outer Islands)and are waiting for their flight back out to a different outie so they staying with for the this time. Which means 2 Elders get the car and phone to teach when they can and do Zone Leader stuff and the other 2 walk around doing missionary work. So I got a day this week to do normal missionary with Elder Ellis from my intake! It was so much fun teaching with him. 

Zone Leaders, AP's and sister training leaders had a really good meeting on Tuesday, we talked about what was coming up in the mission in the year and things are getting exciting (and scary). So new mission president is coming this month, we are working on getting everything ready for him and as AP's will be going back to Marshall's, the new president (president Larkin from Australia) will be turning to Zone Leaders for advice so I need to suck up as much information as I can get. 

Also in the next couple of months we will have a lot of new missionaries, 20+, coming straight from the MTC. So we will be setting the expectations of the mission higher which seem like a hard thing for missionaries already here but if everyone has the right attitude it will be the normal for the new missionaries. All very exciting stuff and we are really pushing to get a temple here is Kiribati!

It will be the best day of my life if I'm here in Kiribati and a Tarawa, Kiribati temple is announced. you now how crazy that will be for missionary work, it will convert the whole of Kiribati. 

We just heard stats that the "Mormons" (which only just came to this country not even 40yrs ago) has more members than the KUC (been hear since the beginning). It's ridiculous, and the gospel is shared through inexperienced 18 yr olds claiming that a 14 year old boy saw God and Jesus Christ... somethings up here... the church must be true. 

So yeah stuff is exciting here on Tarawa, hopefully I'll stay in this area longer than 3 weeks. 

aight, ti a bo!

Love Elder Berends. 

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