April 22, 2014 Is Princess Diana Your Friend?

Greetings,

I'm hoping to have a nice, relaxing P day today since last P day was a bit crazy.  After emailing we headed down to Peace Park, which is a park at the south part of the island.  That's where we made the bwiro.  NTA is actually right next to peace park, so we just had to walk around the Iroij's house (not in front, or they will send their demons after you) to get to the park.  It was really low tide so we wanted to try to walk to the next island south.  We got going and we thought we were making good progress but then we looked back and we had only gone 20 yards or so.  Neitab was with us and that kind of slowed us down.  I realized I haven't talked about Neitab yet.  Neitab is a short Marshallese girl that works with us almost everyday.  She got baptized last year and she's working on her mission papers.  She is always laughing and making jokes.  She's crazy.  She's my age, but everyone thinks she's 16 or 17.  She tries to help in the lessons but she usually just shares the same testimony every time.  She's really funny.  The best part is that she knows everyone on the island so when we get referrals she knows where to take us.

Anyway, walking on the coral was fun.  Some of it would break when we stepped on it, but there's so much coral and we saw other people walking out on it so we didn't think it was that big of a deal.  We were out walking and we saw the Beckers walking in the park down to the beach.  They were the ones that had told us it was really low tide, and we both happened to meet up there at the same time.  We decided we weren't going to get to the next island in time so the Beckers took us over to the oceanside and we got to see some really cool deep pools in the coral and rock.  When it's high tide you can't even tell that the pools are there.  They said the pools were made by the Japanese in WWII and that they dynamited out parts of the rock to make the pools.  It was really cool to walk up to one and look down into the deep water.  We saw a few fish but the water was a little choppy so it wasn't too clear.  I don't know what the pools were used for...maybe to bathe?  But bathing in salt water is nasty.  As we walked there were a lot of sea urchins so we had to be careful to not step on any....and then of course Neitab stepped on one.  She had a whole bunch of black spikes in her foot.  We had to take her to the health clinic in the hospital to get them removed...so it was a fun P day.

We watched the Saturday sessions of general conference on Wednesday at the Becker's apartment.  We had a really yummy lunch too, which was nice.  I like Eyring's talk a lot.  I don't remember a whole lot from it right now.  We're watching the rest of conference tomorrow.

Easter Sunday was a little crazy.  We were supposed to help a woman with her RS lesson and then at the last minute she made us teach the whole thing.  It was a little confusing because she had notes for the lesson and a specific way she wanted it taught, but we didn't understand how she wanted it to be done.  We wished she had just taught it herself.  Sister Tafili and I also struggled because there was a lot of vocab we didn't know.  We were trying to tell the story of the last couple days of Jesus's life and we didn't know how to explain a lot of things.  We then went over to a member's house with a whole bunch of the YW and they fed us bread and hard boiled eggs before we had to be back at the church for new beginnings.  They gave us food and made us eat all of it.  We were stuffed.  New beginnings was really nice and short.

The best question I got this week (from a 10 year old girl):  Is princess Diana your friend?

Saturday we decided we needed a break so we took the ferry to kwaj.  We decided we'd talk to people on the ferry...kind of like bus contacting I guess, but better because the ferry is bigger than a bus.  there was no one on the ferry on the way over, but coming back it was full of people getting off work.  We talked to a couple of people and they wouldn't even respond to us (which is unlike Marshallese people), but then we sat next to a teenage boy and talked to him for a while.  He said he wants to study, so we're going to try to find his house this week.

Some members from Kwaj came over yesterday and gave out 100 lice combs.  They had done a fundraiser to buy the combs and they came over and talked about how to get rid of lice.  We got a comb too!  Which has come into good use...

Okay, I think that's all for this week.  Lesson of the week:  Don't step on sea urchins.

Love you all.  Tootles,

Sister Ellen Butler