Loraana Tout le Monde!!
Sr. Marrett and I started the week out with a Family home evening with an inactive family. It was in Tahitian. Not many of our lessons are in Tahitian, but we have made a goal to read the Book of Mormon in Tahitian as much as we can. It is quite an exercise to do that. I read Te Buka A Moromona with Sr. Richards and we always had to be really patient with ourselves, but it is interesting to see how much we have improved. We made a lot of improvement compared to the beginning, even if we only get through like 5 verses.
One of my favorite parts of being a missionary is getting to learn how to follow the spirit. We had lessons this week where we ended up not following the original lesson plan because the people had other needs. I love the feeling you get when you know you are there in a lesson not to throw up information on someone, but because you care and you want to help someone with their real concerns.
Sr. Marrett got sick this week. I am pretty sure I killed her. We had some super lesson packed busy days when she first got here. Well, that caught up with us and we ended up spending a good portion of Thursday and Friday at our little humble abode. She slept and tried to get better. In the meantime, I listened to like a ton of conferences talks and BYU devotionals. I now feel like super talk charged. It was good to hear some inspiring words.
Saturday we had a survey with the other missionaries in the zone. The survey rotates locations each week, and this week it was ours. The survey asks questions about an English course we give, the plan of happiness, and genealogy. I was super nervous because my comp was sick and I am the one who knows the sector and we had to divide out everyone to go places and do the survey. We also didn't have our coordination meeting because it got canceled. I prayed super hard everything would go alright. It was a super big blessing thing did go well. Instead of just missionaries at the church Saturday morning to do the survey, we had a good group of members and our ward mission leader helped a lot to assign out people where to go. We got a ton of people who responded to the survey, which is great because we needed to find people to teach and now we will be using our time to go contact those people who responded. I was on a split with another sister in the zone (my comp was at home sick) and we found some people and got 2 different return appointments. I have never gotten return appointments during a survey, so that was a huge good success thing. The ward even made sandwiches for everyone after and we never have food after a service project. I was so grateful things turned out ok. There is another example of how Heavenly Father takes care of our concerns.
Saturday, Valentina got baptized. Valentina is 17 years old. She started taking the lessons in January. We had our last lesson with her on Friday before the baptism and I just marveled at how much she has changed since January. She was confident about her baptism the next day. She was ready to start a new spiritual life. She has a really hard story. Her parents both died a couple years ago and then was abused by her grandparents. What amazes me is how much she loves the gospel. She finds the comfort and love she needs in reading the Book of Mormon and being active in the Young Women's program. Her learning and living the gospel really has brought miracles into her life and I am lucky enough to get to see that.
Saturday we also went to a marriage and baptism of someone Sr. Marrett taught. It was in Mahina. After being on the island for two months I finally left the city of Papeete/Faaa. It was really pretty over there. The wedding was really simple but beautiful. They had a little Tahitian "marching band" and everything. They also had poission creu (raw fish with coconut and lots of lime) in the spread of food. That is what I went for. We also ended up doing the Tour of the island (going all the way around it) that night, because we had to drop off some other sisters. It takes like 2.5 hours to do that. It is weird to think I am on a little island that small, but then to think this is considered the bigger island in French Polynesia. It was good to do the tour de ile, but it was at night. I guess you just take what you get because you can't do the tour de ile as a missionary, just cause you want too on a p-day or something.
Friday I got my Valentine's Day package. Shout out to my mom who was so kind to send me a package despite the ridiculousness of the cost. It was fun to get my first package in Tahiti. Please don't send me a ton more, though, seriously I can survive and I don't want to be transferring around with a ton of stuff!
Our investigator, Noeline wanted to teach us how to make the Tahitian hats out of coconut bark. So yesterday after our lesson we started to learn how. We used a piece of a coconut shell to grate the dirt off the bark. We just did a little, but the process takes a long time. We are going to learn little by little. Hopefully, in the end, we will have a hat that looks like the one in the picture of Sr. Richards.
I hope that you all have a wonderful week. Thank you for all the prayers, and love!! We missionaries couldn't make it without all the people both in the field and out of the field supporting us. REALLY, THOUGH!! Love you all! Have a fantastic week! ~Sœur Campbell
baptism from Saturday with Valentina
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