Well another week gone by! Things are going great. First off I better answer questions before I forget them all. So the water in the ocean here is exceedingly warm, their are no waves either. about 200 feet off the coast is a coral reef barrier that stops any waves. the sand is very clean and very nice. over all the ideal beach, one of the top rated in the world! So we eat the same things that we eat in Jamaica, it must be a common caribbean thing. I am not very good at speaking the languages haha I am getting moderately good at figuring out what they are saying though, so that is good. I can understand I just can't communicate without a translator. I know a lot of random vocabulary I just can't put it into understandable sentences haha.
We had another baptism On saturday, Paul Renel Jean. It was very nice and he is a very good guy. We had been unsure if he would be baptized or not but on Thursday we finally figured out what was making him so hesitant about accepting a baptism date and we resolved the problem and committed him for baptism on saturday. One of the most rewarding parts of a mission is Fast and Testimony meeting when you see someone like Brother Jean, who you just helped get baptized, get up and bear his testimony. So that made church really good yesterday.
We had special visitors this week! Pres. & Sis. Ockey. Pres. Ockey is the 2nd councilor in the mission presidency. He is by far the wealthiest man I have ever met and probably ever will meet, hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly billions. The weird part is that he sort of got rich by accident, he taught high school and decided to build a home and people liked it and wanted to have him build them a home, so he did and now for the last 30-40 years he has just built homes and is now one of the top 50 home builders in the world. Anyways so they took us out to eat at some really nice restaurants and that was a lot of fun. I think my very favorite part about Pres. Ockey is that he looks and acts just like Uncle Jim, he even has his little reading glasses that he pulls out for everything. They came on friday and left this morning. It was nice to have them. They come and visit once a month, so that will be something to look forward to.
Wow...I don't have anything to say, haha this week has been fairly the same, nothing really to report or make mention of. We ride our bikes here, sort of, we live far from the church so we ride to the church, park our bikes and then walk. since we have to have a translator for most things and they don't have bikes we just walk around with them. We spend a lot of time at the church because everybody knows where it is and it is easy to just have translators and investigators just meet us there.
General conference is this next weekend, I am excited for that! That will make the weekend very excellent. Our Branch President is back in town and so I finally got to meet him, he has a really thick spanish accent and is really nice.
Sis. Herbert was telling us all about this fun bingo game she found for conference on the church web page and was amazed when I told her that I played that every conference growing up. The Herberts are really nice, they are from alaska and both taught elementary school. I don't remember if I already told you about them.
Well from the sound of your emails it sounds as if life at home is going well. Do you have any idea what sort of classes you are going to take yet laura? Church was good, sunday school is always weird, our teacher isn't so great at staying on topic, she sort of likes to just tell us her thoughts on life and it can get really boring. Pres. Ockey taught priesthood/reliefsociety. It was a good lesson, so that was good.
Santa Cruz is doing alright, I emailed elder tonks last week and asked him how things go. Still no baptisms, but one of the people we were teaching should hopefully be baptized in the next week or so. Things are slowly turning around he said. So that was great to hear.
Last night our phone decided to give us trouble. it turned off and when we turned it back on it wanted a security code that neither of us knew. well we were supposed to get a call to report our numbers for the week but our phone wasn't working. I spent the next 40 minutes trying everything I could think of. the security code could be anything from 0-99999999 so to many choices to try a systematic way. I just guessed anything that seemed like a logical default code and nothing worked. In the end I was talking to elder brough and not paying attention just pushing numbers at random and pushing okay and all of a sudden it worked! I had accidently typed it correct! what a miracle! well we called in our numbers late, but they didn't mind, they were just glad to hear from us. about 10 minutes after our numbers were reported my companion unplugged the phone charger, the phone turned off and then when we turned it on it wanted the security code again...which we still didn't know. So the phone just didn't work and we couldn't figure it out again. thankfully it worked just long enough to report our numbers. This morning we got it all fixed and I went and changed the security code to something really generic that anyone can guess in case it happens again. Weird phone problems and a very fortunate pushing of random buttons, what are the odds!
Well that is about the week. Life is great, I don't know what else to say. This new email system is great, It is nice that everyone has the same pattern for email addresses so I can just guess all my friends emails. I hope this next week goes wonderful, I will attach a picture next week. Enjoy conference and anything else that is going on. I love you all and look forward to next weeks emails!
Love
Elder Talbert
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