Rat Hunting and Rides from Strangers

Well everyone, I'm sorry I didn't get to send an email last week. I was in a computer shop with a ton of little kids and they were all yelling and trying to read my emails and stuff, so we just decided to leave and try to make it home for studies. But this week I have a little more time and some positive news I guess.

We finally got a Branch Council Meeting together. Two weeks ago, after our email time, our President Reeder called me to tell me he's worried about our branch and wants us missionaries to shift our focus from investigators to less active members. Our feeling was that there wasn't any point baptizing someone into a non-functioning branch where they would likely become less active. We Elder Lapana and I decided that if our branch president wouldn't take the initiative, we would. We visited him and told him we have to have a meeting this week to discuss the branch's problems. He agreed, but didn't think anyone would come. When Sunday finally came, we actually had most of the auxiliaries at the meeting! It turns out they've been wanting to take action for a while, but president had never called a meeting to do so, so they were kind of helpless. We've already seen some good things happening from this too.

So that mostly sums up our work. We've almost completely shifted our focus towards less actives.

The fun part of the week, and probably one of my favorite parts of my mission was: Rat Hunting. One of the counselors of the Stake Presidency invited my District to help him clear his rice fields of rats. We had no idea what this meant so we just showed up not knowing what to expect. He has us remove our shoes and we start trekking through the rice fields. On the way, he hands each of us a big stick and just says "for the rats". We get there and they have a big machine for crushing the remaining rice stalks. The guy controlling that makes a circle around a portion of the field, causing the rats to run to the center of the circle. The circle gets smaller and smaller and rats randomly run out trying to escape the machine. That's when we take our sticks and smack them. I had the first couple kills. We probably caught about 45 rats, or 5 kilos. Best part is that we had them for lunch. Tasted kinda like chicken. I'll send the pictures next week.

The next day, we decided to have an adventure day and try part of our area that hasn't been visited by missionaries. About 3 hours of walking through the mountains showed us why no one goes there. But we made it to the ocean, and it was really beautiful. But then we had a problem. We had to reclimb the whole mountain if we wanted to get back. It was that or take the long way by boat through a different zone. We picked the mountains. We walked for about an hour and we were already exhausted. But some nice guys in a van came and were nice enough to give us a ride back to the main part of our area. I know it's usually not good to accept rides from strangers driving a van, but in this case it was a blessing.

Love you all and I'll talk to ya next week!

7/7/14