Week 13: Office- Who needs ice cream cones anyway?

Dear Family and Friends,

Thank you all for writing me and talking to me. Sometimes I sometimes get terribly lonely being in such a different place. Everyone’s humor is different and nothing is the same but it's fun and I’m adjusting! Thanks to the young women for sending me their letter and from the Brice family. I'm sorry to hear about Grandpa Ray and I will pray for him! Hopefully he get's better.

I miss the SNOW! I heard we got a lot of it in the motherland. I'm sitting here sweating bullets, but that's okay! We have had some crazy wind recently, there is a big cyclone doing a bunch of work up in one of the northern islands of Tonga. We haven't gotten very much rain yet, mostly just wind. Sometimes the power flickers on and off but that's okay. So the big thing that happened this week was the arrival of new missionaries. We got a plane full of them on Tuesday and it involves a LOT of work! (Well for the office people it does.) We were doing stuff all over the place; I didn't get to go to my area for 2 whole days! The day they arrived I didn't get home until 10:40, which is super late for a missionary. Luckily we were allowed and weren't just being disobedient. The second day we didn't get to go to our area, but were running to and fro places delivering food, dealing with luggage, meetings, and all the fun stuff. Afterwards we kind of just relaxed and began our work again.

Tongan culture of the week, I learned when I got here that they eat bread in loaves, or half loaves. You don't really get slices very often. They also eat ice cream with bread, which was weird, but now I’m converted. The half a loaf of bread idea works really well, you carve out the inside and make a sandwich. Its really convenient and I’ll include pictures.

For a late Christmas present I was able to go into the Liahona welding lab with a senior missionary guy and work on a welder that was acting funny. I finally get to use some skills!! Yippee, anyway, I found out humidity kills welding machines when they are not in use and being taken care of, so there were a lot of dead machines. Other than that it was a really slow week; not much happened. We are working with members trying to get investigators. Our guardhouse friend S has disappeared and we have only seen him once recently. He told us he was drunk at Christmas, so I guess were starting out back at square 1, oh well! That's all I got, I love when people email me, Remember to tell me what's going on! LOVE YOU ALL

Elder Sitaki