Elise's mission letters

  Iaorana tout le monde!  I hope you all had a wonderful week! This week was pretty challenging for Sr Young and I, but we worked very hard to find some new work to do and saw a lot of miracles on the way!  For example, we learned that the only thing keeping Reid from being baptized was the fact that he didn't have a tie. I don't know who told him that you have to have a tie to be baptized but whatever. Sœur Young and I swooped and set his baptismal date for August 27! He is super excited to be baptized. Also a member bought him a tie and Red exclaimed "nooooo I can't wear the tie I'm not baptized yet." This man.  Reid is honestly the miracle of this transfer. One day, Sœur Young and I went street contacting. At one house, this man came out and yelled at us for several minutes in incomprehensible Tahitian. We had very good reason to think he was crazy- bloodshot eyes, bare feet in the mud, just yelling at 2 sisters. One of the only things we understood in that...

  Iaorana tout le monde! Eaha to outou huru? How are you all doing?  This week was pretty normal. Nothing too crazy happened. If you could all keep Ismaël and the Peu family in your prayers, that would be much appreciated!  Marunui was baptized! He is 8 and his parents are members, but we have done a lot of work to help reactivate them and teach the kids the lessons. He is kind of a punk but we love him. Our bishop recounted the following story during the baptism:  Bishop: "Marunui do you obey your parents?" Marunui: "less and less."  Oof. Got to love the honesty.  Speaking of children that are punks, everytime we go to an apartment complex in our area, these two 5 year olds start chanting "S S M! S S M!" over and over. Once we were there for an outdoor lesson and they chanted these letters, off in the distance, for maybe a half hour.  We have no idea what these 3 letters mean. Super sœurs missionnaires? Salut les sœurs missionnaies?!? I have no clue. ...

  Iaorana tout le monde!  Some events:  Heiti got baptized! I am so proud of her. It was a really amazing baptism and she seemed so so happy. It was also her birthday! Yay Heiti! Red (crazy Tahitian papi who speaks 0 French) came to church! Unfortunately, church happened to be 100% in French that day- not even a Tahitian hymn- but I think he still enjoyed it.  Sr Day got sick. We called the new mission nurse and expected her to say something simple upon the lines of "oh, just take a nap and drink lots of water!"  But no.  The mission nurse sent Sr Jorgensen and I on a wild ginger chase at 9:30 pm. We needed to make a RAAU (Tahitian word for medecin.) We walked through our neighborhood, found someone with ginger, made the raau, and all 4 of us were forced to drink it?, all while staying on a video call with the mission nurse. I was not happy at having to drink disgusting hot lemon water at 10:45 pm, but the mission nurse kind of scares me so you just have to...

  Iaorana tatou.  And now we are going to slowly, gently move into popoti pose. Imagine this:  Sœur Young is a certified yoga instructor. Every Friday morning for our workout she leads us in yoga. There we were, doing all those downward facing dogs and childs poses. And then, I lied down (laid? did lie?!?) directly on top of a popoti! A cockroach! I quickly sat up and the cockroach ran underneath Sr Day's bag.  Sr Young gets a broom to sweep the cockroach away. Mr. Cockroach makes a beeline to Sr Jorgensen. Our eyes follow his movement but suddenly we have lost his position.  Sr Jorgensen slowly stands up. There is silence in the room.  Suddenly, Sr Jorgensen starts screaming and thrashing around.  THE COCKROACH IS IN HER LONG SLEEVE T SHIRT.  Luckily, she evacuates the cockroach and he was later angrily squished by Sr Jorgensen's shoe. All is well, all is well.  A few weeks ago we found a man named Red. He does not speak any French and at fi...