Week 4 in New Caledonia

If you didn't read last week's post, you need to in order to understand the beginning of this one.

So this week was kind of crazy! I`ll start with how we got back home.

So when we left, the zone leaders still hadn`t called back, so we were obligated to attempt to walk home, and ended up super-lost, because we have a REALLY good sense of direction. Just as Soeur Raney finished praying we would find our way, the B. family pulled up in their van and asked us if they could help! It was seriously an answer to our prayer, especially when we learned we`d been walking in the wrong direction for 45 minutes!

So we didn`t have any money to get food after the machine ate our card, so we`ve learned how to be really creative this week. We would have been fed more by the ward, but there are 5 sets of missionaries in our ward, and only two active families in our whole area, so we made it work. We`re also working on perfecting the "hey look we`re starving sister missionaries, feed us" look to give to people so that they`ll bring us food ;)

So we took a dinner hour the other day and played frisbee, and ended up meeting all the neighborhood kids, including two investigators from whom we hadn`t had the chance to meet yet because their lessons keep falling through. It was an awesome evening!

So we walk a lot, and the terrain in our area is pretty rocky, and so Soeur Raney and I have both managed to put holes in one pair of shoes already. Go us?

Well that`s all I`ve got for you for this week! I love you!

P.S. Shoutout to Austin Gale for getting his mission call to Chile! You rockl!

A few pictures Jordan shared with us this week:

A picture of Jordan and Sister Raney at their apartment.  They were scheduled to teach an English class; but nobody showed up so they let the Tahitians teach the Americans. We played pictionary, but the Tahitians were making up the words, and decided that pokemon and characters and movie titles were the way to go. 

Jordan is sporting one of their neighbor's hats.  

Week 3

Hello all!

So this week has gone by really fast, I`m not even sure what all happened!

So we have a ton of lessons pretty much every day. Soeur Raney says that this is the most lessons in a week she`s had the year she`s been in NC. So it`s been busy and great! It tends to either be bright and sunny all day, or raining on and off all day, mixed with bright and sunny. Like changing as often as every 10 minutes. It just happens to turn to torrential downpour when we walk outside most of the time on those days. It`s still always warm though, so we don`t mind :)

Okay, so we have a ton of new investigators this week! We still have our neighbor and his family, who we gave our last BoM to. Yeah, the LAST one in our whole apartment. The order didn`t come through, so our mission is currently out of French copies, so it was a big deal to give that one away. We prayed about it for almost a week first to know who to give it to, and he`s been reading it almost every day, and it`s been super awesome! We`ve been doing english lessons for him and his brother too, and now when we walk through the parking lot of our building, one of them will yell out the window (with heavy accents) "good afternoon! How are you?" and when we respond, they laugh and go back inside because they don`t understand what we`re saying. It`s pretty entertaining.

About an hour and a half, we managed to get our bank card stuck in the ATM. Luckily the internet guy is really nice and we`re Americans, which is super rare and cool here, so he`s letting us use the internet for free, but we`re waiting on the zone leaders or the senior missionaries to come save us so that we can go back home, since we don`t have any money for the bus and it`s a couple hours of a walk... not to mention we don`t really know how to get there. So that`s the exciting news for today!

I think that`s all I`ve got for this week! I love you all!!

Pictures from week 2

Picture of beach close to her apartment.

She has it really rough, wouldn't you say??

Dragonfruit. In her words, "It looks way cool, but tastes kind of like watery kiwi."

New Caledonia, week 2!

Okay, so this keyboard is a little but more familiar now, but it's definitely still not automatic, so this may be pretty short depending on how quickly I can type!

This week was really awesome and I'm not quite sure where to start. So first off, I'm learning just how bad I am at applying sunscreen. I constantly have little sunburnt spots where I missed sunscreen. But I'm learning!

Also, we only got lost once...maybe twice...this week! We're finding shortcuts to get places, but it still takes a while to get to our appointments sometimes. We have one investigator who lives about a 40 minute walk uphill from us, but she's furthest from us right now, and most if the way back from her house is downhill!

We met some neighbors who are really great. One of them is a 16 year old names V. who plays guitar! His mom, brother, and himself are now investigators, and they invited us over for dinner Wednesday night. Plus, they get home from school really early around here (they have to wake up at 5:30anm to go to school) and so after this, we're going to go play frisbee with him and his brother.  The whole family is great!

There are a lot of Tahitians here, and they always serve the best meals, so the other day we had a dinner appointment with people we hadn't met yet, and so Sister Raney called them. When she got of. The phone, she looked at me and said, "Yes! They're Tahitian!!"

One family around here who helps us out a lot has three daughters. The middle daughter is 10 years old, and she gave the cutest talk on Sunday! It was kind of shocking though, how young they have people start giving talks in church. She had her mom and dad on either side of her, helping her out. 

Well, I'm pretty much out if time, so I have got to go! I love you all!!!

New Caledonia, week 1

Hello! So it's a bit difficult for me to type, simply because these keyboards are...well...French. So some of the keys are in different places. But success number one, I found the apostrophe key!

So my are is Dumbea sur Mer, and it's really pretty. My companion/trainer is Sister Raney, and we get along really well, she's teaching me all kinds of things (I even are sushi when she made it - no, there was no fish in it, Mom, that hasn't happened yet).

When we arrived in Fiji to transfer to Vanuatu, we were joined by four other new missionaries from the New Zealand MTC. Vanuatu was super hot with a LOT of humidity, it was a lot of fun to be there though! I was there for a few days, so President Brewer (mission president for that area) assigned me to the sister training leaders there in Port Vila until I left for New Caledonia. It was really interesting to see how things work there, it is just a completely different culture there. And Bislama is a cool language! It's pretty much the Haitian-Creole of English. It was cool to hear it spoken and I could understand most of it, but not all of it.

We went to the airport to leave on Friday (me and two elders who came ere to NC as well) and ended up being there for somewhere around 4 hours. They ended up canceling our flight several hours after it was supposed to leave and rescheduling for Saturday, and although it left 30 minutes late (which is about as close to on time as it gets with Air Vanuatu, apparently), we did get here! It's much less humid here, but still pretty hot, not that I mind!

Our apartment is HUGE! We even have air conditioning in the bedrooms, which I'm told not everyone has in our zone. So since my comp and I are both new to this area, and we don't have a car, we managed to get ourselves lost for a little while yesterday...twice, for a few hours... We got a lesson to teach this week out of it though, so at least it was productive??

I just happen to have come here at exactly the right time, because tomorrow, Elder Anderson is going to be here! We have a meeting with him, just the missionaries, and that evening, everyone is invited to we him speak. We've invited our investigators to come in the evening with us, and everyone is super excited about it.

Well, that's about it. I love you all!!!:)

Breaking out of the MTC!

Jordan left the MTC today to start her journey to Vanuatu and New Caledonia.  She will travel from Salt Lake City to LAX, LAX to Fiji, Fiji to Vanuatu.  She will be with the Mission President in Vanuatu for three days and then will fly over to New Caledonia, where she has received her first assignment.  

She is fairly confident that most of her assignments will be in New Caledonia; which ensures she will have more frequent access to internet (vs. being assigned full-time in Vanuatu).  I have updated her mailing address on the right side of this blog to reflect her New Caledonia mailing address.

Thank you to all of you who have offered prayers for her safety; we covet those prayers!  We will update once we have more information.

Flat Jordan goes go-kart racing!

We went out to go carts and Flat Jordan was insistent on tagging along.  Here is a little insight as to the adventures of Flat Jordan.

Waiting her turn and photobombing Nathan while he races

 All geared up with a neck brace

She even decided to ride the carousel

Look for future adventures of Flat Jordan!