The Big Island! Ka'u, My First Area!

Well I will start off with the plane ride (P.S. Mom thanks for the outline that actually does help a lot).  We left the SLC airport at about 11:30am and got to Honolulu at about 3:30pm (but it was a seven hour flight.  You do the math).  The Assistance and the President were there to greet us.  They are all awesome!  My mission President is hilarious!  We then went to the President’s house where he gave us a little devotional thing about missionary work and being obedient in everything we do, then we had dinner.  His wife is also one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.  She takes care of all the missionaries like they are her own kids.  This was the first time I had fresh pineapple.  Sooooooo Goooood!  I love it!  After that we all opened our letters to see where our first area would be.  It was like we were opening our call over again!  It was so exciting to see where everyone is going.  Only three of us were sent off island.  Elder Grover went to Kauai (no sure how to spell that) and Elder Vanhille (my buddy in MTC) went to Maui serving in a tongan ward!  Way cool and I went to the Big Island!  Woohoo!  I got on another plane the next day after orientation and when I got there, Elder Gardner and I went straight to work.  We went from the airport to a lesson.  It was kinda hard to teach because I didn’t know them but I did the best I could and it actually turned out be a very spiritual lesson.  Bridget (the mom of the eleven year old who we were teaching who is less active member) broke down and started crying.  Hopefully she will start coming back to church.

I have been trying this whole week to figure out how to teach with the spirit and just forget about trying to teach the lesson.  Also this week we met the bishop a bunch of times.  We could not have a cooler bishop.  He is a recent convert and has had a huge turnaround from being like the biggest drug dealer in the area!  Oh my area is called Ka’u (ka-oo) in the Hilo district.  But anyway the bishop is an awesome worker and is such an amazing person!  We also lift weights with him every other day.  He is huge!  I will send pictures when I get my card back.  My mailing address is still the mission home and then they forward it over here.  It is pretty much as country as you can get here in Ka’u.  It is a really small town where everyone knows everyone.  It doesn’t exactly look like you would think Hawaii looks.  It is more lava rock and country looking land. Haha.  We have the biggest area in the mission!  It is bigger than the whole island of Oahu.  It was nice to go to church this Sunday so I could put names with faces of the people my companion is talking about all week.  Haha.  I will get it though.

We have had some crazy time tracting.  One guy in Oceanview, which is where all the crazy people go to hide I’m pretty sure, but anyway, we walked up this guys driveway and he started yelling at us that he wasn’t interested but we kept kinda talking to him then he got up to walk inside and he wasn’t wearing pants! And his brief underwear wasn’t exactly brief if you will.  He was pretty much naked…groooosssss!  On that note, hope this was a sufficient email.  If you have anymore questions, send me a letter!

Aloha!