FOOD!

FROM HOLLY -- McKade always sends a note to our family before his group e-mail and I thought you all might be interested in some of the things he shared with us this week.  He sent some great photos of the turtle sancturary, but we are having trouble downloading them, sorry.  We will update pictures for both blogs as soon as possible.  

Cher famille,

I had a thought I'd like to share, especially for mom and dad. I was thinking about how our prayers to God are kind of like my emails to you. You want to hear from me, as often and as much as you can. You want me to ask you stuff, and probably thank you for being so great. But that's not what you really want. You want to hear about me. You want to know what I'm doing, and how I'm doing. You want me to tell you how I am becoming more like Christ, and ask for your help when I'm confused on how to do that. You want me to tell you that I love you. Well, God wants all this same stuff from us in our prayers. Thanking him and asking him for stuff is great, but we need to talk to him. You say that you love when I sound like me in my emails. God wants to hear you, not a recording that you play before bed each night. Basically, when we pray to God, we should tell him stuff about what we are doing in life, how we are trying to improve, and ask for his help with that. Prayer gets so much more personal and powerful when we do that. This applies to everyone, but I thought mom and dad would especially relate because you know how it feels on that end.

Sweet, now I'll get to your questions. We have a stove and an oven, and a few pots and pans and cookie sheets and stuff like that. We can get lots of pasta and rice, and probably potatoes, but I haven't bought any of those yet. The grocery store we go to is pretty big and modern, but it is an hour from our house so we only go on P-days. There is a smaller one close to our house, so I can pick up eggs and flower and sugar and more common stuff there. The pictures I sent was food that we made. It was mostly elder Jackson, haha, but I helped a little! I have been cooking more and more though, just to try to get better at it. I never drive, elder Jackson always does. First off, not only do you drive on the other side of the road here, but the roads are small and people drive super fast and scary, haha. But the main reason is that a licence costs $100, which is like 30 or 40 US money, but either way, it would be a waste if I got it and then went French speaking the next transfer. But I don't mind not driving at all, haha. We drive everywhere we go, so we don't walk a ton. The only times we walk a lot is when we are contacting or tracting somewhere, but with both areas now we don't have a ton of time to do that, we are usually in lessons or driving from one place to another.

For P-day we normally just get together and play soccer or something with all the elders on the island, but today we went to Beckway, which is a small island close by, which was super cool! We rode a ferry for about an hour to get there, then went to a turtle sanctuary, which looked like a pretty crappy place for the turtles, but we could get into where they were and pick them up and stuff, which was cool! The island and the ocean are so beautiful, the pictures don't do them justice at all. That stinks for you I guess! At least you don't have cockroaches and stuff living in your house! There isn't one food that I really miss right now, but maybe I will later in my mission. The island isn't third world though, just most of it is so poor that it might as well be. But there is a KFC and subway in town, and a good grocery store. 

 Love you all!

Hey Everyone!

I don't really know what to say about this week. There is only one more week of the transfer, which is crazy. It went by so fast! I'm getting better and better at understanding the people here, which is good, but there are still some people who I can't hardly understand at all. It is really funny sometimes because I will ask someone a question or say something in a lesson, and they will respond, and I'll have no idea what they said. And repeating it doesn't help sometimes, because the way they talk is just weird. Here is an example. One thing that I heard people say a lot is 'pie ya day'. But they say it fast, so it sounds like one word. It actually means 'part you there.' But that still doesn't make sense. So what they are trying to say is 'where are you.' So even if someone said that one word at a time, I still wouldn't know what they are saying. But I'm learning!

Something fun happened this week. I got a meal that took a lot of effort to finish. I was happy, because I felt like a real missionary when that happened, but also not happy, because even though it tasted good, it was a lot of food, haha. It was rice and chicken and breadfruit. I don't know how to describe breadfruit, but it is about as hard to eat a lot of as mashed potatoes. I don't know about you, but after eating a lot, mashed potatoes are just a chore to eat, and although breadfruit is a different consistency, it doesn't have much flavor, and there was way too much of it on the plate. I was eating outside, and it was dark, so the lady who gave us the food wasn't watching us eat. When I finished I went over and thanked her, and she was said "did you eat all of it?" I said yeah, and she burst out laughing. She was like "I didn't think a skinny guy like you could eat that much!" I was thinking the same thing, haha. But it was fun.

There is a guy named Keith that I want to talk about today. He is a member of the church, but had a stroke a few years back, so he can't move around very well. He walks really slow, and cant get up and down stairs without holding on to something. We usually visit him a couple times a week because no one else ever does, and he is just stuck at home, but recently we have been taking him out teaching with us. And it has been so cool to see him change over the past couple weeks. He seems happier, and every time we go to his house, he wants to go somewhere with us to teach. And he even blessed the sacrament and bore his testimony this week in church, which he never has really had the courage to do before. Sharing the gospel is so great! He is an inspiration to me, and I hope he is to you too.

Well, that's all for this week. I hope all of you are having a great time with whatever you are doing right now. And if you made it all the way to the bottom of this email, congrats, I don't think I would. I don't even read Braden's, haha. Don't tell him that. But I do email him separately. Well, now I just sound  like a jerk, so I guess that's all I'll say before I dig myself into a deeper hole. 

Love, Elder Kerr