Driving a Monster Manual Van

Mauri mauri kain te auti!

(There ya go, you can be a missionary in Kiribati. We say that

probably 20 times a day. It's what you say when you walk up to a house

to greet them. Study that one, Elder Breckenridge!)

Sooooo.....There really isn't that much to report this week. We have

been pretty busy this week because it's...TRANSFER WEEK!!! That means

we are super busy driving people up to the airport, picking people up,

dropping them off, etc etc. I'm getting pretty good at driving that

monster 12 passenger stick-shift van around. It's only a little

different from the automatic Honda Civic I drove back home. Aren't you

proud, Wyatt?

The work is going pretty well in our new area. We share investigators

with the AP's, so we cover a lot of ground together. There is this one

family that we found a few weeks ago that was progressing really well.

It is a 30-ish y/o couple with their two kids. At first, they kept

trying to run away from us and get out of lessons. Now they actually

are excited to have lessons! They literally make a meal for us before

we show up to each lesson! They understood really well and even

started reading the Book of Mormon. Then, this week, we showed up to

teach them. Nobody was home. The neighbors told us that they just

hopped on a fishing boat that morning that wouldn't be back for three

months. Sigh...

We do have some other good investigators though. We teach one

lady and her husband. He has a tumor in his

mouth from smoking that makes half his face swell up to about twice

it's normal size, but he's really faithful. Have you ever seen

"Zootopia?" You know the sloth at the dmv counter (I forgot his name)?

She literally talks like that. On the upside, it's really easy to

understand her! Why couldn't I have had more investigators like that

when I first got to Kiribati? We always have plenty of lessons

scheduled for the day, but we don't always get to all of them. We run

a lot of errands for President Larkin and do administrative things

(like filing marriage license requests with the

government...blaaghhhh...). Long story short, the work here is way

different. For example, for p-days in Onotoa and Tarawaieta, we would

wake up and do our laundry in a bucket, go fishing, chop some

coconuts, play cards, make some food, exercise, take a nap, read, or

go exploring in the forest. Today, in Tarawa, we woke up, did laundry

in a machine, took a shower, cleaned our house, went shopping (I found

a carton of 30 blueberries for $16...don't worry, I didn't buy them),

and went and played ping pong at the stake center. Yeah.

Anyways, life is good. I still miss Onotoa, but I'm getting used to

the work here little by little. We should have a few baptisms coming

up this next week. I feel so good after a solid lesson. I've

definitely felt the Spirit during lessons. Sometimes I finish talking

and I'm surprised at what I was able to say. Sometimes we finish a

lesson and I feel really happy and I don't know why. Sometimes I

literally see a change in people that I know didn't come from my words

alone. It's moments like that that make all this craziness worth it.

There's only one way to explain it: it's true!!! If you don't know it

yet, go find it now!! You won't regret it!

Elder Barker

(PS - yes, my fingernails are doing fine. Thanks for all the concern)