Week #42

Bula Vina'a Family and friends! Another crazy stranded week out here on Levuka! We've been out here for the past 4 weeks straight (and about 3 months total) and have almost lost our minds ;)! Finally this morning we woke up at 3:00 am to take a boat to the main island for Zone training meeting! I'm not trying to brag but who else gets to say they had to take a boat to get Zone training meeting hahaha! So, right now I'm in Nausori. Today should be fun! We are going to have a beach p-day today. It's going to be a duel Zone flag football game. It was pretty funny coming into Nausori today! I was kind of in shock! In Levuka since it is such a small town we see the same people every day hahaha. Nausori is A LOT bigger than Levuka so seeing all these random strangers was pretty fun! Tomorrow is transfer calls.....I don't get how 2 transfers went that fast. I feel like I just emailed you all last week saying I was transferred to Levuka! I've been in Levuka for as long as I was with my trainer Elder Barnaby.....3 months..... Days are long but weeks seriously pass by like nothing. It scares me! I'm praying I can stay here in Levuka because it is the best place on earth! Yesterday we were invited to a Fijian birthday party from the chief of the village in Baba! He and our newly confirmed member, Akuila, took us up to the peak in Baba last week. Now before any of you freak out....the peak was the actual peak not the crazy one.. but we died....from exhaustion because it was that high. It was way better than the other peak! This one had a nice SAFE SECURE SOLID trail that led straight to the top. From the peak you could see EVERYTHING! All of Ovalau and the surrounding islands. It was so pretty and I got some pictures that I will send! It's been such a fun week and I've been connecting with our members and Elder Bond and I have been working hard! This week we did a lot of finding new investigators! Finding is always fun because you never know what types of people you can run into! Last night we were walking around town just trying to talk to some people when we came across these two guys. They were way chill and Elder Bond and I spent awhile talking to them. One of them was extremely interested in the Book of Mormon and when I asked the other guy when we could come visit him I got the weirdest response ever haha... He said, "Well...there's no set time you can come over, I might not even be home tomorrow, it's even possible that I might die in my sleep tonight, so... just whenever you guys are free?" I had no idea how to respond haha! Our less actives the "Fong" family have been a lot more open to letting us come inside their home. Our first approach with them when we first started in Levuka was just to invite them to church by re-sharing all the lessons. That hasn't been working out for them so now we are just going to try to become better friends with them and invite them to start doing smaller things like read the Book of Mormon every night as a family. One of our investigators, Rolagi, had an interesting lesson on Friday. It didn't go the way we expected it to at all. It was 99.9% lead by the spirit. Rolagi is an older guy in his 80's. Missionaries have been visiting him for awhile and he's been telling us he knows the church is true. We've been inviting him to get baptized but he keep giving the excuse that his wife is Catholic and she will be too hard to convince. So we sat down with him on Friday and he told us that he talked to his wife and decided that his baptism from when he was baby was all he needed and that he no longer believed that he needed to be "re-baptized"! We both felt prompted to share Moroni 8 with him concerning the baptism of little children. After the lesson he admitted that he knew what we shared was right and we re-committed him to pray to know for sure if this church is the only true church. He said he would and I'm praying that he will pray to know! Please keep Rolagi in your prayers! I had a funny moment on Saturday night...and by funny I mean pretty embarrassing! I made a Fijian language mistake... So we were in this lesson with a brand new lady we met on the street named Mere (Mary). Since it was the first time sitting down with her and her family Elder Bond and I introduced ourselves. When talking about my family I told them how I had 3 younger sisters and then I said “Keitou na yalewa kece!” Which in Fijian meant we are all girls (including me)! Their whole family started laughing and as soon as I had said it I realized that I had said it wrong! It was pretty bad, but funny hahaha! This week has been full of crazy things that I wish I had more time to write about. Levuka is the place to be and I love serving the Lord. I miss all of you! Till next week! Moce mada. Au nuitaka kemuni kunea cequ ena nomuni Siga Tabu nikua!

Love, Elder Jonutz