May - another month 2015

May 4, 2015

Another week has flown by.  They are just starting to run together.  The people here on St Thomas have a holiday for any excuse they can find.  They closed school for a whole week to celebrate Transfer Day - the day the Dutch turned the islands over to the US.  They have just finished celebrating carnival.  A whole month of activities.  Although school was only out for a week. It has been interesting, only a few islanders were at church yesterday.  Must have been a hard carnival for them!

We went down to the Food Fair on Wednesday and you couldn't stir them with a stick - so many people.  The food was island food, lots of beans and rice.  They had BBQ pork, that was anything but what I think BBQ should be.  They do not use any tomatoes in their BBQ, so it is brown and the flavor - is well interesting.  It was expensive $30.00 -$20 was for a meal in a white carry out dish. (like what you get from a restaurant if you cant eat everything and you take it home).  No control over what is cooked, where it is prepared or who prepares it. It is eat at your own risk. :)

We took cookies to our investigator from last week that didn’t want to meet this week.  We had a first meeting with another investigator this week.  It is another one of those, “don’t know when I will be available, I’ll call you”. We will follow up this week and see if we can visit both of them anyway :)

We started our temple prep class Sunday.  We have a young man who is getting ready for a mission and about 6 other islanders that will be in the class.  The problem with our island brothers and sisters are, they have to work every other Sunday. Which makes it a  challenge to get everyone thru the class with all the lessons.

We were asked to help out last Thursday with the girls’ camp.  They only had one priesthood holder to be with them, so we spent the day with the youth.  That will make you feel old!!!  It was a good time.  They asked us to give a spiritual thought on service before we left and she told us later that it set the tone for the rest of the camp. Made us feel good and we also made contact with 4 couples that we gave pass-a- long cards to (they were visitors to the islands).  So we felt we were doing some missionary work. 

 The girls participated in a Make a Wish, as part of service for camp.  A young boy wanted to be a pirate.  So our girls were the pirates.  They were the extra's as they had the ship and main people already on the ship.  They then took him to Water Island on the pirate ship and we follow in a water taxi.

 

 We had a great time!

They sustained a new branch mission leader on Sunday.  We invited him to dinner and went over his responsibilities.  He is excited. And we are too!  One of the families in the branch will be leaving this Tuesday for the states and not coming back.  They will leave a big hole in the branch, especially in the music department as she is the only person in the branch that plays the piano.

We started back again with our walking 3 days a week. We have extended our walking distance from 4 miles to 5 mile today, this getting old is harder than we thought.  It takes so long to get back in shape and only a couple of weeks to get out of shape.

We sure enjoyed Emily and James coming to visit us.  They told us to take the time and do things with our children.  And we did.  We went to St John and visited lots of beaches.  I hope they enjoyed themselves.  We even took them with us for a couple of appointments.  And we got a couple of new contacts when we took them to Mountain Top the famous souvenir place on the island. So all is good.