All is Well

Kam na bane ni mauri n te bong aio!

How's it going, everyone! It literally feels as if I was sending out an email just yesterday. This week has been crazy busy. Elder Fifita did service for this elderly man that lives behind us and we cut open coconuts for 4 hours. Talk about a work out... He had a pile of a couple hundred coconuts and we would just grab one of the pile, lay it down, and cut it in half. We had been there for a couple hours and I was tired so I didn't even look at what I was grabbing. I would just reach out, grab a coconut and through it on the ground. I grabbed one and I felt something crawling on my arm. Once you have lived in Kiribati, you don't think too much of that because there are constantly ants, mosquitos, and other bugs on you, but I decided to look and I saw a spider the size of a baseball crawling up my arms. When you look into the eyes of the spider... that's when you know it is too big. In my mind I was thinking, "Not today spider!" and I flung my arm around and sent it flying haha.

Later that week, our whole district was gathered together to do another service project for the Branch I serve in. Afterwards, the little boys wanted to show us how to open a coconut just using a tree and your teeth. Instead of husking off the outer shell we just smashed them against the tree until it cracked, and then we used our teeth to peel away the outer shell... Please don't tell my dad that I was using my teeth to open up coconuts.... oops... It was actually so fun and I'd say I'm slowly but surely becoming an islander.

If you get any cuts on your skin here you gotta be careful because there isn't much clean water. Unfortunately, Elder Fifita had a couple cuts on his hands that got infected and guess what helped clear it up? Sticking it in the ocean. Literally, the salt water cures everything here so we woke up early in the morning, headed to the beach and sat there while we soaked his hand in the water.

This week seemed pretty great! Unfortunately, things sort of went downhill towards the end of the week. There one day that was pretty rough... we had lessons fall through, people laugh at me because of how I sounded trying to speak their language, our filter for water broke so we had to go search for water somewhere else and everything just kept getting worse. I'll be honest, I was irritated. I had given up everything back home to come serve this mission and this is what I had to deal with... As these negative thoughts went through my head, I opened up my Book of Mormon and see the words, "All is well" written on the front cover. I had written that there months back to remind myself that no matter how bad things may be... in reality, all is well. It is crazy that when things get bad, we forget all the GOOD things around us. As this new week starts, I set a goal to remind myself that all is well. I'm doing the Lord's work, and I really do know he loves me. I know that that is his promise to all of us... no matter who we are... or what is happening around us... all is well.

I love you all! Thank you for everything! Until next week!

Love, 
Devon

1) Elder Fifita and I and our Branch President! He is a stud and he served a mission in the Dominican Republic
2) Coconuts are not supposed to be this big
3) Our flex off after cutting hundreds of coconuts
4) The biggest conch I have ever seen...




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