The Ring is Mine!

Family,

Well great to hear from you all again this week! I am glad that the $5000 got to you and that Chad Called. He and his wife were really nice and fed us an excellent meal. A lot of craziness has happened this week so I actually have something to say! In response to your question mom about if I need anything, I can't think of much, I seem to have all the essentials, so anything is good.

Last monday we went to some alleged Pirate Caves, how they know pirates used them I don't know, but they were really cool! We had to climb down into them and whatnot. Very beautiful views from outside the caves and inside the caves.  The sand was very interesting in the caves, mostly just very tiny particles of coral and seasheeIs crushed from the ocean pounding on them over and over. We also saw lots of rock carvings from stranded people after shipwrecks. It was awesome! There was no one else out there, not really a high tourist spot so it was just us in the middle of nowhere. I got some excellent pictures. I would send some, but unfortunately sister Herberts computer is giving trouble (it won't finish booting up, it just sits at the apple logo eternally) and so I am using some less effective computer and as such I won't bother to attach any pictures this week, but I will be sure to send some next week. On a similar note with the faulty computer that throws a curveball into the skype thing. The Herberts are trying to get it fixed today, but we will see how that goes. For mothers day (this sunday) call at 5pm Utah time (we are 2 hours ahead here, so 7pm TCI time). Now I am going to give you the Herberts email address and our phone number, this week email the herberts and if there comptuer is working they will let you know and we can use skype but if they don't get it fixed call my phone number. Sister herbert still goes to an internet shop and emails and so if their comptuer isn't working she will let you know and if it is working she will let you know and give you all the skype info. Either way 5pm utah time. I look forward to it! You can probably email here today or tomorrow and just keep in touch until a definite desision is made on her computer.

Funny thing with that computer, I have inheirieted the knack from dad to fix things without any idea of what was done to fix it. Sis Herberts computer has been not working and so she brought it to me and after 10 minutes I had it working perfectly (no clue what I did) well we made a back up of important things just in case. Then 4 hours later it stopped working again and hasn't worked since, if I had more time I would like to mess around with it, but I don't, so other options are being attempted.

now for the madness of this week. Immigration problems have been getting worse. This week on Wednesday they swarmed an area (about 30 immigration officers) and they caught around 52 haitians. The bad part was that they got 9 members of church, and 2 of our very best translators. We were teaching 2 lessons, I was upstairs in the church teaching, and elder brough was downstairs teaching. My lesson finished and Gelin my translator walked downstairs and went to the branch presidents office. I went down about 3 minutes later, I saw all the immigration and went back up the stairs. 5 minutes later elder brough joined me and said that the guy he was teaching and our two translators saw immigration and had all gone into the bathroom and locked themselves in. So we just waited upstairs and eventually immigration arrived and told us that we had illegal immigrants downstairs and that they wanted us to open to doors. well we had keys and so we had to open all the doors, except we didn't have the bathroom key. They broke through the door and They caught our 2 translators and our investigator. and sent them back to Haiti.It was pretty crazy. now we don't have an elders quorum president and teaching has become a lot more difficult. It wasn't much fun either to unlock all the doors knowing what was behind the doors.

so that was crazy. But just when we thought it couldn't get any more nuts Pres. Ockey came to visit and informed us that Pres. Graff had been released..??? That was a huge surprise. Why, I don't know. Elder Coleman of the 70 is now running our mission with Elder Tanner and Elder Sizemore as his Assistants. We are getting a new mission president sometime at the end of this month or the start of the next month. I will definitely miss Pres. Graff, I have learned a ton from him and have become a very good teacher from the things that he has talked to me about. It is weird to think that he is gone (he is already home in Texas) and that I will have 3 mission presidents. Pres. Gingery for 5 months, Pres. Graff for 10 months, Elder Coleman for 1 month and some other guy for the remaining 8 months. They haven't told us who the next one will be but they did tell us that they have already made the call. I doubt I will ever know him all that well. We don't hear from the mission president out here very often only once every 2 or 3 months and by the time I return to Jamaica my mission will be nearly over. Well I wrote Pres. Graff a thankyou note and hope that he is doing good. It came as a huge surprise to us and everyone, I don't think anyone expected it, I highly doubt that even Pres. Graff expected it. This Friday Elder Coleman, Elder Sizemore and Elder Tanner are coming to visit us, so hopefully we will know more then, either way it will be a lot of fun to see Elder Sizemore and Elder Tanner, they a 2 of my favorite missionaries and I have served with both of them previously.

We have 2 investigators with a date that should be baptized this weekend so that is exciting! I am looking forward to that. We have a handful of other investigators that should be baptized this week or next week. We met some very nice people from Guana, Gyana, something like that, sounds like Guy-on-uh. They were interested and I am excited to meet with them again this week. I finished the book of psalms and have been working through proverbs, very good, I like the book of Proverbs a lot more than I liked psalms, I felt like after I had read the first 100 psalms they were getting repetative, very similar ideas in many of those psalms. I am hoping to finish the Old Testament here next week (not this week). I really like the Old Testament and look forward to reading from it again, perhaps at a slower rate, I have never read it through before so my main goal was just to read it and get an idea of what was in it at sort of a surface layer.

My diet has been very good as of late. this weekend I have been eating great. This morning for breakfast I had a bowl of multigrain cheerios followed by a few glasses of orange juice and a banana. For some reason it has just been on my mind a lot so I decided I should try and eat healthier. I figure poptarts aren't the healthiest breakfast, they are a lot less time consuming and easier to deal with, but there isn't much nutritional value, especially in those chocolate chip ones. (they only sell Cherry and chocolate chip ones here....).

 Ah! time is running short and at these internet cafes if you don't send your email in time the computer just shuts off and you lose everything. I had more to say but I guess it will just wait till sunday and next monday. Think of things for sunday to talk about. Things are going great dispite all the bizarre changes. I am having an excellent experience. hopefully this week is great, and hopefully the snow doesn't keep returning, we don't have any here... I love you all!! Take care.

Elder B. Kent Talbert