Week 7: Tonga- Arrived!

Dear kau kakai, 

Hello everybody! It's me again. This is quite different form last time I emailed. Right now it's about 4:21pm, Saturday the 21st. I'll email on Saturday's from now on. So life here is awesome! I love it! When I got off the plane it hit me for a second, like what the heck am I doing in some dinky little island in the middle of the Southern Pacific, but then I got over it. I went through customs just fine and met President Tupo. He's a big guy but super nice and friendly. I was still kind of freaking out so I didn't say much. Everyone was still speaking English to us, which was nice. We drove to the mission home, had a little snack of pineapple and tuna sandwiches, and then went to bed. We woke up early, and starting packing stuff. We are only allowed to bring one suitcase with us wherever we go, so everyone took like half of his or her stuff and we put the rest in storage. Then we had breakfast in President Tupo's house. It was all American food still except for fried spam. That was new. After that we interviewed with President. It went well; he said he doesn't normally do this, but I was assigned to be an office missionary with this Palangi (White) guy. His name is Elder Anderson. He's super chill; he's been out a year so he speaks well so that helps. He's from Riverton, Utah. Anyways, I’m learning a lot, but I can barely understand anything.

We got to our MQ (mission quarters). It's pretty ghetto, so totally missionary worthy. It's an offshoot from a member’s house. We live exactly next door to the temple. It's got 3 rooms; bathroom, bedroom and front door room. Yeah. Anyway, I’ll give you the square footage next week and I’ll put pictures this week. It’s small. Actually just yesterday they put a hot water heater in. It's a classic job; they wired power from a nearby light, and then put a new outlet and the plug for the water heater right above the shower. It works really well!! Except it flips the breaker for our whole house every time we use it. I think they are fixing it right now.

Anyway, so I work in the office. I work there until 5 then we go preach. The weird part about our area is we don't have any non-members. We teach in a little neighborhood and the Liahona high school. (Church high school). There are 0 nonmembers; 100% of people are baptized. We have 1 inactive family, and we teach a guy who works at a guard station. It's not too bad; the members are awesome. To teach, we ask members to bring in friends and non-members and we teach them. So we almost always have a member present. The first lesson we taught was funny enough, in English. This lady understood English better. She brought her boyfriend though who was fairly anti-Mormon and tried to argue to whole lesson. We decided not to bring him again. The other person we teach a lot is S. He works at the guard station and he's a champ! Before i got there, they asked him to pray about the Godhead being 3 people, not the Trinity. He got an answer to his prayer and now he's super teachable and prepared. We teach him in Tongan and he loves to learn. We challenged him to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it. I also invited him to be baptized after he received an answer to his prayer. I didn't understand him, but he said, according to my companion, "Why are you asking? Of course I will be baptized if I know it's right! That’s why I’m here listening to you!" That's awesome. All right this email is too long, I’ll send some pictures. 

'Ofa atu!