Walking for miles and breaking beds

So this is yet again coming to you all a day late, but that's because here, Easter is celebrated on Monday, so nothing was open yesterday! We even took the bus to go get groceries at Carrefour, which is kind of like a Super Walmart, except much bigger, and it was closed. So we spent all of P Day just hanging out and writing letters. It was actually pretty great. 

Okay, so story of the week:

This week, we went to hunt down a referral we received from a member. We'd kind of been putting it off since we had to walk about an hour and a half to get there, and another hour and a half to get back, plus they live in the squats, so they don't have a specific address. So we finally had enough free time one day to go over there. We ended up talking to a lot of people along the way, so we left at around 1 or 2, and got back about 6pm. Once we got there, we didn't find the person we were looking for, but his brother invited us in to talk to him. After a few minutes, we asked if we could start with a prayer, and he let us know that without his cousin (the guy who gave us the referral) there, we weren't allowed to teach him. We presented what's called a geste, which is really where you just present something (in our case, some brochures, since that's all we had) to the head of household, say words like 'respect', and then you're accepted and allowed to be around the rest of the family, and then we left. Later the next day, we were looking at the maps we just got last week of our sector that actually outline our boundaries, and found out they don't even live in our sector!

So that's my story for you all. Oh, and we broke a bed. Apparently you AREN'T supposed to stand on them to get a cool picture using the camera effects. But we have three more in the apartment!

Well, that's what I've got for you all this week! Happy late Easter!!

Sister Frost

Letters home

I received the following letter from Jordan and I feel I need to share, just in case it happens to contain what one of you just might need to hear today, too.

A little background to the letter: Jordan had been teaching a woman and her daughter about Jesus, but the woman seemed hesitant and Jordan couldn't figure out what it was.  A few days later the woman finally told her she didn't believe she was good enough or worthy of Jesus' love, and she hoped one day she would be.  But until she became a better person, Jesus would never love her fully.

Jordan writes:

"I want to bear my testimony to you as I did her.  Christ did not come for the perfect.  He came for the broken, those who are imperfect, those who want to be better.  The Church is not for the perfect. The Church is the way to develop our divine potentional, to become more like Christ, in the knowledge that someday, after this life, we can be with Him. He loves every single one of us, unconditionally."

Our world changer is changing my world.

TWO WHOLE DECADES!

I know today is the 14th of April, but I'm still not sure it's my birthday. I mean, I'm cool with the celebrating and eating cake part, but just because another year has passed by, does that mean I HAVE to be 20 years old? I'll take the silence as a no. I'm glad we've discussed this, and I'm still 19. Cool.

Okay, so this weekend, we finally got to watch general conference! It was so cool! We even had two investigators show up for two different sessions, and an inactive family in our neighborhood bought a car last week and showed up! So pretty much, we're just super-excited about life over here. I took a TON of notes, and we've been talking about it a lot. Our investigator M. kept talking about all the stories in the talks, and she wanted to stay for the second session yesterday, but couldn't because she had to drop her stepdaughter off at her mom's house. She especially loved Elder Bednar's talk :) I don't think I can pick favorites among the talks, but I did really love the mix of accents they've got going in the general authorities, and the one that sounds kind of like Gru from Despicable Me was my favorite accent, in case you all were wondering.

And now, the stories for the pictures.

The first picture is of a really cool handmade bad that one of the senior missionaries, Sister Pecqueux, gave me. 

The other is of what happens when you put fries in the oven, forget about them, and then leave for conference and don't come back for six and a half hours. We just feel blessed that the apartment complex didn't burn down, especially since there's no smoke alarms here.

This was our last lesson with L. before she left for Wallace.

Me wearing a Walesian dress given to me by an investigator.

The little house where we were able to email last week.

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

Seour Frost

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!!!