Week 2 in Tahiti: Explaining to people that there is such a better place than McDonald's.

Bonjour! 

Okay so first off my keyboard is very broken and it's french so there will be lots of erors because they have a different keyboard layout and its frustrating haha.

This week was a blast! we had three baptisms and one of our amis(hes 10) asked if i would confirm him. I said yes of course but that wqs the most stressful sunday of my life haha. But a truly humbling and spiritual experience nonetheless. I forgot to say that I get fed by members almost every night and its always great. I never thought Id enjoy cow heart:) haha. also sending pictures here is realy hqrd so i hope i can send some today. We had lots of lesons and we found some new amis too. overall q good week; president Bize cqlled my companion and i alma and amulek (im amulek) that was so cool to hear from the president. from what ive heard hes sometimes a no nonsense person and i realy like that actually. Also i only get warm showers if its sunny. notice how i said warm and not hot. our roof has a solar panel that heats up the water sort of. I can count on one hand how many hot showers Ive had. Makes me feel like i took the mtc showers for granted.  No one here has lawn mowers except for one man ive seen. they al use weed wackers to mow their huge lawn type things. I will never complain again about using a lawn mower. one of our &amis got married friday night and then she was baptized right after by her husband which was the coolest thing ever. their names are Alma and Ruths. We then ate lots of food after the weding:) and po'e which for those who were at my farewell my mom made some but the stuff here was totally different ONLY because the ingredients they use here just don't realy exist in the states. we have the same stuff but like everything here is natural and awesome. 

Because i don't have much time left, i will sign of with my spiritual thought! 

When i was talking with president bize and he caled us alma and amulek, my companion said that its not us dolnig the work, its the spirit. I realy liked that because its so true. Missionaires can work and work, but without the spirit, we're all just young adults bearing testimony and hoping people want to listen. but with the spirit, mirqcles can be acomplished. Ive already sen plenty of litle ones. the spirit is the most important part of this work. 

thats all for this week. Love you all lots

-Elder Christensen

Week 1 in Tahiti

I'm just going to say that whatever I did in the pre-existence was good because I got put in the best sector ever. All the members are awesome and so are our amis (investigators) 

So my first sector is called Hitia'a. It's sorta second world honestly. It's not very close to Papeete and I'm pretty happy about that actually. Faa'a and Papeete remind me a lot of Mexico and the city. My area is on the other side of Tahiti. You can look up a picture somewhere and get a better idea of where I'm at. My companion is Elder Sovereign and he's awesome!! He's been out for about 8 months now. He started his mission in Bora Bora and this is his second sector. He'll train me for 12 weeks then probably get transfered out somewhere. He's from Gilbert, Arizona and he came on his mission right after high school. 

My sector was actually one of the hardest sectors here until about 6 weeks ago when Elder Sovereign came in. Currently we have 9 baptisms fixed and we just got three new investigators last week so that's super exciting. (currently I'm emailing from a church building that's in the sector next to us. We live with the two zone leaders and they're so cool. 

Some fun facts. Everyone here loves to eat dog but they don't eat it that often but I was told to choose which puppy I wanted to eat and I just laughed/cried on the inside. All the kids here speak terrible french apparently. I only know that because my companion told me. They all call me peter parker/ spiderman and they call my comp superman. I also got called hulk yesterday and I was really confused because I don't at all resemble the jolly green giant on steroids. It's rained every single day here so I've been soaked every single day. 

The other night I ate sashimi and it was amazing. I thought I would hate it but it's pretty darn good. I ate this amazing fruit called a rambuton(i think that's how it's spelled) and its unlike any other fruit ive ever had. I'll send a picture. 

Last week an investigator that I've never met asked If I would baptize her. I said yes of of course but I was really confused as to why she asked me. 

Also some people can't say my name because it's either too long or too hard. Some people call me Elder Christ... 

This weekend we have a marriage between Alma and Ruths and then our investigator (Ruths) will get baptized that same day. 

  

For the next 6 sundays we will be traveling the around all of the stakes in Tahiti to sing for a concert thing and yesterday I got to see all my MTC buddies. That was super fun. 

I was reading in PMG the section about Christlike attributes and I decided I would try to be more diligent. It's important to work hard as a missionary but diligence is harder. For Christ, he never stopped being diligent especially when things got hard. I really think we can all apply that into our lives. Basically the lesson I learned and am still learning is that we need to try our best to be like Jesus Christ. Love you all!!!

Elder Christensen (peter parker)

Final Week MTC

Iaorana!! 

Okay so I have a crazy story for you all. So a few weeks ago the mission president on my MTC portal changed to a mission president in Texas and I thought nothing of it. I thought it was just a glitch. It happened to Elder Crandall and me and another Elder in our zone, Elder Conley who's from Canada (his said a mission president in Halifax, Canada which is Eastern Canada). Anyway we were doing in field orientation yesterday which is an all day thing for departing missionaries. I really loved it. Well during in field yesterday Sœur Mitchell told me that she met someone who's missionary portal changed and that person received a temporary mission because of visa problems. So I start to freak out and Elder Conley and I decide to go to the travel office and ask them what's going on. After a few minutes a man walks out and tells me I've been assigned a temporary mission to the Texas McAllen mission and that Elder Conley's visa hasn't come through yet so he might have to go to Halifax for a transfer. Needless to say I'm freaking out in this moment and don't really know what to think. So Elder Conley and I go to lunch and tell our zone what's happened. Well the travel office guy told me that I would get new travel plans for Texas. So I check the mail and there's nothing. I decide to talk to the mail people and they say they don't have anything for me. I then decide to talk to the travel office again and he does some searching and finds an email that says that my visa came in yesterday and to tell Elder Conley that his visa came in 20 minutes prior to me showing up. So Elder Crandall and I run to try to find Elder Conley and we tell him he's going to France and he won't be delayed. All of this happened in a span of about 90 minutes too. What I have to say about that is that the Lord is looking out for us and sometimes things get crazy but if we keep a level head and have a positive attitude about our trial, we will be blessed and we'll be more grateful for what we have been given. So yeah that's it. Not going to Texas. I leave for Tahiti on Monday!!!

Love you all.

-Orometua Christensen