Week 72 in Ha'apai

This weeks highlights:

Monday- Ran out of ranch dressing. Sad day. No more crouton tasting breakfast crackers. Lots of teachings.

Tuesday- I got attacked by a vicious mother chicken, and yes indeed "the chickens have large talons." Went tracting around in the rain. Fun time. Lots of lessons. 

Wednesday- Met a crazy lawyer, ex-stockmarket conman from new zealand. Very very interesting conversation with him. He was actually a very smart guy, but also kind of crazy. Fun combination. More teachings. I freaking love our Bishop too, he is the man, so helpful. The family that we were teaching in his home this night, they've accepted the invitation to be baptized and they told us "we have been waiting for missionaries to come back for three years". That was awesome. 

Thursday- We went tracting in the rain again and at one point the rain started falling so hard that we hid under  a mango tree. Grant saw a fallen coconut and asked if I wanted a drink and I said yeah, throw it against the tree. So he did weakly and I picked it up and said "no grant, you gotta throw it hard like this" it was much more prepared to break than I thought it was, and shattered violently against the tree, pouring coconut water all over Grants shirt and tie.... hahah oops. One less white shirt for grant. Taught a minister of a another church just after that, and he asked us to come back. Also, we went searching for a guys house deep in uta (the forest/bush) and Grant started talking about how cool it would be to wander upon a tribe of really native tongan people walking around with loincloths around their waists and being super dark and all this crazy stuff, and then we both freaked out as our hearts stopped for a second and saw what looked exactly like the type of person we were describing staring at us. Turned out that it was a statue, loincloth and all. Super freaky. The freakiest part was that we walked another hundred feet or so and looked back at the statue... and it was turned around facing us! Freaking freaky tongan voodoo magic going on. Freaky.

 Later that day, we had fafanga at one of our members homes and the twenty four-ish year old guy there told us all about his time in Australia trying to learn english and being compounded with the refugees for overstaying, his iran refugee girlfriend and so on haha. At one point he told us that he didn't learn about the FLDS people (polygamists that call themselves mormons) until after a long while of people calling out "multiple wives eh!", and him not knowing english, yelling back "io!!!" (Yeah!!) hahahaha. 

Friday- Met a crazy breadman who told us all about his row team days. Fun church activity where we taught. Good food. Reminded me of the good old days when X and I would hangout and talk for hours while eating food on the couches in the church hallways at church activities back home. Good times. 

Saturday& Sunday- lots of great teachings. 

All in all this week was great. Things are going awesome right now. We have 8 baptisms set up for the next three coming weeks and are teaching 24 people. Its great. Nothing is more fulfilling. Its amazing how someone can change their lives so drastically by deciding to listen to the missionary messages. Its awesome. Love it out here. Hope you guys are all doing well too. 

Ofa Atu, Elder DeSpain