March 29th, 2009

Well hello again. Sounds like everyone had a good week and Garyn is super lucky like Savanna and won't spend college and all of high school with braces :) haha. We were busy this last week with zone conference. Elder Winn informed me that Savanna has not written me again, he checks my mail :) haha...not really on purpose but they are the mail sorters. Did Maddie and Savanna write Elder cheney and Elder winn letters? I think they are both still waiting for letters so i still think you should :) haha.

Conference was really good. We have a lot of people going home, including two of our couples and three of our assistants, so it was kind of emotional. Time is going ridiculously fast for me. I was really shocked to realize it was March and now it's over! Wow, i can't believe it seriously. They worked the board yesterday so I will know next Monday if i am transferred or not. It's very up in the air. PResident did ask me at interviews about how long i've been here and how my companion is doing with the area and at conference he told my companion to learn the area well.
It is VERY summer here again - wow. I think I forgot after all the months of fairly nice weather just how hot it gets here and just how much I am capable of sweating.

On Sunday we were happy to have some of our hopeful baptisms attend church for the first time. We committed one to baptism but he isn't yet sure, but he showed up to church so that is progress, he even knew many of the people at church. We taught him lesson three which is the gospel of Jesus Christ and I hadn't specifically planned to commit him to baptism yet but the spirit was really strong as we taught so we listened. He is still going to pray about it but we are hopeful.

A note of culture -- or something...all of the children are very skilled in creating their own kites and they fly them all day long. At almost any time you can look high up into the sky and there is a kite flying high...and i am amazed at how high they get! They have ones shaped like bees or bats etc. and the very little children make their own very small ones. I'm not sure what they make them out of, it's very thin plastic like paper and they use bamboo sticks which they carve down to be smaller. it's kind of scary tos ee a seven year old carving down a stick using a curved knife as long as he is :) haha. THey have another game they play here where they use one of their fip-flops as a base and one as a "ball" of sorts and they throw it to each other, kick it and run. They catch spiders and hav ethemf ight here like in my last area but they don't seem to have the bettles here that they would attatch to string like in my first area.

Carin sent me a letter. She said she talked with you on the phone. I guess the house you rented is not the one I was imagining. I don't know much about theo ther house but it's closer to the apartments and is the only girls house now in my old ward. Carin willb e moving, however, I don't know if by choice or if she just didn't sign up for an apartment on time :) She's planning to live close anyway. Does Savanna plan to go find work their early, start school, what?

We are teaching another family who has heard some "bad things" about the church, things not even my companion knew. I might have talked about this already. My companion is also new to the church and until here she didn't know anything about Jospeh smith having multiple wives or much about polygamy besides Brigham Young. I personally do not either -- at least not any details. WEll, somehow our investigators heard something about this and they were concerned. Their neighbors also told them that we are a cult.

I didn't feel overly concerned about answering these questions, but we prayed a lot and i did some studying on the matter myself. Once there we simply asked them about their prayers and reading from the Book of Mormon. We explain that our church is christian and we also askedt hem what their understanding of a cult is -- and if they feel what we have taught them fits there. They basically answered their own questions ont hat matter. As for the many wives. I went witht he Abraham approach and we also discussed God having him sacrifice his son which goes against hte laws of God but if it is commanded of God it is from him and we must follow until told to stop. They also understood very well how Abraham had his two sons from different wives which populated the earth. This discussion came more about fromtheir own questions and reasoning -- I didn't go into it to much. Then our investigator said "so it's kind of like with nephi also how he was told to kill someone..." i knew she had been reading but she hadn't told us much about her reading yet, she picked up on that all on her own and we were able to relate the Book of Mormon, bible, and current church all together. In thee nd they had no problemswith our explanation of polygamy in the early church, less than I even expected and after our visit was another of those times where my companion informed me my Tagalog was very clear -- God helps us as we do ourp art to continue to study and pray and the truth is very evident to the open mind and heart.

I'm ready to close now, so i'll talk to you next week and you shall know if i am leaving the island or not! hmmmm?

Sister Landrum