A video!!

Here is a video in which Daniel shows his house where they lived while he spent six months serving on Beru. What a view!!

Christmas Week 10

wasup

so past week was long. Probably cause it was filled with so much. definitely a solid week.  Yesterday we watched conference as a branch in kiribati and last monday I watched the priesthood session while
Stone skyped his family, the ensign also showed up this week so conference finally feels real to me.

Other than that this last week really showed us how so many weeks of hard work but not much reward can all of a sudden just all, i dont know, in kiribati I'd say it has "yielded its fruit". If that sounds weird blame the language.  Anywho it was really good.  It really came together for the district conference. I think we had over 120 people show up from Banana if not more.Also, the Mom in that family I told you about is doing really well and the dad is coming along but we had to drop the daughter and hope maybe it'll happen later for her.

Anyways it was a great week and the mail plane came in which meant letters and my birthday package! Whaat?  We're planning on going down Sunday night and getting some ice cream and finding someone with an
oven to make the cake that you all sent and have dinner with a member family for the big day. Should be good.  21 is a huge bday here so if it was Jacob or Katie out here they would probably have something huge
thrown for them haha.  By the way happy birthday to Jacob and Katie And Mom this past week. I'm planning on sending Bday letters to all the bdays so far. We'll see if that happens but

I love you all and I'm doing great out here and hope everythings going great back home!

Love

Elder Pettingill

Christmas Week 9

Hey guys,

So solid week.  Uhm I feel like I already sent my weekly email by answering all of mom's questions so I'm kinda burnt out now so just tell her to forward that ;)

Looks like hold the skype off till June.  Love yall

Love,
Elder Pettingill

Questions:

Did you see any miracles this week? Yeah we actually did. I restarted writing down a miracle a day and so far I've had plenty. This family that we've been teaching who have seen so many problems finally had the mom quit smoking and the dad is close and the dad came to church for the first time on Sunday! Their names are Maina (like maine ah) that's the wife and Uriam (oo dee uhm) and the daughter teboima (te boy may)  If you all could pray for them that'd be awesome.

How did you recover from the disappointment of not being able to skype last week? actually we just work hard so it was good.

Have you been to the stick hut where the other Elders live? Yeah I have. 

Do you wish you lived there or are you glad you are in the hotel? No it has animals and mosquitoes going in all the time, so do we but at least we have mosquito screens that kinda help

Have you ever had to drive on your mission? Not yet

How big is Banana? not that big like a 15 minute bike ride or less from one side to the other and then are some other random wilderness villages too called Bambu. Takes like 20ish minutes to bike from the hotel to banana

Did you finish the church "building" you talked about last week?no that'll take awhile

Is there more fruit available on Kiritimati? yeah lots of papayas

You talked about some rough patches last week. What does that mean and why especially you?  it's good. we're just hitting walls is all. nothing we cant handle though ;)

Would you like a copy of the Conference Ensign? we have conference on a flash now we just need to find a time and a place to watch it and next Sunday we are all watching it in Kiribati but I would still greatly appreciate that!

Do you want to wait and skype on June 14 when Jacob will be home and Katie will be here for the homecoming? Can you clear that with President Weir? hmm well we were planning on skyping today but actually that sounds wayy awesome and we could totally do that.  I'm in and it shouldn't be a problem with president or anything like that

love you

Stick house where the other Elders live

Captain Cook Hotel where Elder Pettingill and Elder Stone live

a living compound in Banana

No skype but some emails back and forth

Well, we were all skeptical that the Skype plan would work with Daniel. We were supposed to be on with Jacob and Katie this morning and he was supposed to get on and join us. Daniel tried with his smart phone at the hotel where they live, and then they went to Tabwakea, which is another little village, to try at the home of a member. None of it worked. I'm sure it was pretty frustrating to him. But we enjoyed emailing back and forth with him (while also taking care of our church responsibilities since his emailing fell during our last hour of church--let's just say my class of six-year olds was not as reverent as usual due to a distracted teacher!) I thought you would enjoy reading some of the emails that we exchanged. Italics are us, regular type is Daniel's responses. This is all pieced together between his emails with me and with Rich. 

hey sorry...skype's not working as of yet. Don't even know if it will or what, I'm late cause we came down to Tabwakea to try it and nothing so far....

Okay, keep me updated. Should we go home? 

No if we get to skype I doubt it will be today......

Where are you? 

We're at the only internet cafe that works in Tabwakea...Ya it's not what I would have liked to happen for sure. Everyone else seems fine with it though

How are you?  

I'm good. Elder Buhler and Sister Vailea came in on Wednesday and brought a few letters and my Easter package with them. Thank you so much for that by the way. You're the best. Most of the letters were from feb and some of march.  

How was your week? 

Week was good. watched Meet the Mormons with the branch last night. had to translate the whole thing so that was fun. We're starting work to build a chapel/a big thatched shade structure. Went pretty fast like normal.

You said you guys had a baptismal goal as a district for 20 baptisms this month? How's that going?  

Uhm the baptismal goal is not going as great as it was supposed to...basically right now we are all going through some rough patches (especially us). It's actually exactly just that rough, but it's good for us all to get some humble pie right?

How are you feeling that you'll be out a year here in less than a month? I can't believe that Jacob will be home so soon (in one month). What do you feel are the things that you've learned the most? Any goals for the next year? 

Can't believe Jacob will be coming home soon. It seems weird I'll be the only missionary.  Well as much as I love being out here it's really tiring and I think I'm feeling it more especially today. But it's cool, went by wayy fast. Haven't thought about goals yet. Lessons? Probably integrity. not like lying and cheating and stuff. More like an internal just owning up to my work and not complaining. spoken or unspoken. Hard but it's important and easier to feel the spirit all the time if you do.

Rich shared the following story that happened this weekend: So we had our father and sons outing this last weekend. We've been wanting to catch a lizard and feed it to the snake but haven't been able to get one. We kind of gave up because the snake was hungry so on Tuesday we fed it 3 baby mice.

On the camp out the kids caught a lizard, so they immediately wanted to feed it to the snake. It was a pretty good sized blue belly lizard. We brought it home and dropped it in the cage. The snake seemed interested and the lizard very nervous, but nothing much more than that. I figured he probably wasn't very hungry since he had just eaten. Well the lizard ended up running over the snake and so Zeb attacked him, squeezed him to death, and then ate him. It was really cool. 

Daniel's response: Catch lizards all the time here, we were doing service taking out some

coconut tree stumps to build a new chapel out here and turns out there were a bunch of camoflauged geckos living on some of the stumps so we we took a few of them out with the hatchet and I managed to catch one. Which also taught me that they were the biting kind although it didn't hurt it shocked me enough to give it a quick axeing. It was pretty cool. Plenty of crabs and geckos too. None of the ones you want though. No snakes out here either. They are supposed to have pretty cool birds too. we'll see if one of these pdays we can go down to the place they are at.

It seems we saw a  reference to eating some blowfish which are poisonous but from which the person was going to remove the poison. You're still alive so I'm guessing it didn't kill you ;-)

They didn't end up getting it. next time...

So the reality is that we ended up getting more from him than usual. I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful that, unlike at Christmas, he was at least able to email with us. I miss him today and will be praying for extra miracles and blessings in his work to boost him up this week. 

Christmas Week 7

Heey.  Still Here

How are you all?  Sound pretty good from the emails. Yeah it should be fun for skypes next week.  There is a member in Tabwakea (one of the villages) with pretty good internet we might go sleep down there and use internet on Monday but I don't know if we'll be able to get it that early i will try.  Also we could try our hotels
internet on our phone and see how that works... should be fine if there's a problem we'll let you all know!

It was a pretty awesome week. Hard. but good. Got a little sick on Thursday-Sunday but definitely saw the blessings as we worked through it and stuff just came through for our investigators.

Kiritimati is great. no need to worry about me. I'll see you all next week!

Love,

Elder Pettingill

To Mom:  

Haha I don't know why you all think that (I told him everyone is so impressed with how well he handles this mission)...honestly Kiribati just feels like home nowadays (or rather a second one ;) I love it here. The people are great!

Favorite lesson was with one of our investigators who has been struggling with smoking and whether or not she wants to get married to her husband because she thinks he'll just go less active after baptism
and hold her back from the temple. After seeing about every trial possible we showed up and taught her
and had an awesome lesson about aki-mamatam (fasting) and how it can answer all her questions because it is so powerful.  Spirit was way strong and she tried it on Sunday and seemed to be to doing a lot better

I'll work on the skype thing. Let you know if there are any problems!

Got a couple letters from awhile ago last week.

Love,
Elder Pettingill