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October 31, 2017

Hey Everyone,

I'm not sure why I capitalized the word everyone, but I did, and it's too late to change now. Kind of. Don't put too much thought into what I just said. Well, anyway, this week was pretty good. The mission president came and visited us this week, and he went contacting with me and my companion yesterday evening. I was actually super stressed out, because he said he wanted to go to some lessons with us, but no matter how hard we tried we couldn't get any lessons set up for that time, so when we picked him up I had to tell him that we had no appointments, and that our only plan was to go contacting the rest of the night. Luckily he was super happy to do that, and it was actually great to have him with us, because he was really good at starting conversations with people, and he taught me a lot about how to start talking to people, and how to keep talking to people.

I was gonna tell my spiritual experience first, but that opening transitions really well into the other thing I wanted to share. The president came to the island on Friday, and the other companionship gave him rides to where ever he needed to go because Elder Ackley is the zone leader, and we don't have any other cars here right now. Elder Ackley's companion is a Elder McNaughtan, and a new missionary. He was kind of reminding me of Elder VanPelt in the best two years movie, because he really wanted to make a good impression on President, and it was kind of funny. One of the days he forgot to shave in the morning, and Elder Ackley was giving him a hard time about how president was gonna notice, even though it was super hard to tell. I don't think he knew that I heard him and elder Ackley talking about that, so a little bit later I said, "Elder McNaughtan, you're looking pretty scruffy today." and he got so worried. He was convinced that President noticed and thought he was a terrible missionary because of it. Of course, we told him not to worry about it because it really was hard to notice, and he actually is a really good missionary. But it was funny to just see how worried he was about it. After reading through that paragraph, it sounds like I was meaner to him than I actually was. I promise we weren't being mean, we were just joking around with him a little bit. But it was funny.

There hasn't been much service to do here, at least not much that we can find. We ask everyone we talk to if we can help them with anything, but they all say no. Lots of them say we should have been here six weeks ago to help, but they don't need help now. But we are trying our best! There was one experience we had with service that went really well. We were out contacting one night, and we were about to head home, but we decided to try one more house. There was a guy there who said we could talk to him about our message, but when we asked if we could come back and meet him again some time he said that he was too busy, and one thing he said he had to do was clean about 200 plastic chairs that he had. Right when he said that I told him we would help, and he was surprised, but said we could. So the next day we put on our work clothes, and went and scrubbed chairs with him for about two hours. It was so fun to do something that wasn't just talking to people! Especially for me, I really enjoy time by myself where I can just do something and be in my own thoughts. But that's not the point. The point is that we really helped this guy, and he was super grateful, and said we could meet with him a couple days later. So we taught him and his wife the restoration lesson on Saturday, and it was super spiritual and awesome. It was one of the best lessons I've had, and I know it was because we took the time to serve him.

Other than that there wasn't anything super amazing or different this week. We have mostly talked to people in English, but we did teach a couple lessons in French. One went horribly wrong, and at the end I thought he was saying one thing, and my companion thought he was saying something completely different, and we still don't know what he was saying. He was either trying to get his grandson (who is a member already) to go on a mission, but didn't have enough money, or he wanted his grandson to go on a mission because he thought that missionaries got paid tons of money. I guess we'll try to figure that out another time, haha. Well, have a great week everyone! Oh, and the plumber is at our house today, we should have running water by Thursday! Yay!