WEEK 11 SPRINGDALE (WEEK 104 OF MISSION)

Iakwe my family and friends I love you and miss you all.  I am so grateful for the opportunity I have had to serve my mission!  Kine was baptized and I was honored to get the chance to confirm her in church on Sunday and she is such a wonderful young girl! Other than that I mean it was a big week but I will have to just tell you all about it in my talk and when I see you all! 

Kine's Baptism.  Also in the picture Bubu and Sister Loveland.
Something of note, I am proud of myself because I translated the entire baptismal service into English for the people there who didn't speak Marshallese.

The branch threw a big surprise going away party for me!  It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.  I could not help but feel so humbled by the love they have shown me.  I can’t really explain to you what I feel about all of this and I can’t really explain how many mixed emotions I feel leaving, especially leaving my favorite area, but that is okay I know that there will be more opportunities for me.  

Mikey sure loves the Marshallese people!
And they have been so good to him.

Such a fun send off.

The Lanjes.

The Clinton Family.

Mikey with Zazu.

Sister Kejon and Lolita.

Mikey and Janda.

Thank you all for all you have done.  I can’t wait to see you all!

Signing out for the last time!

Meek Meek :)

WEEK 10 SPRINGDALE (WEEK 103 OF MISSION)

Yo Yo Yo yello, hope all is well in your life.

 

Ohhh shoot that eclipse is coming!

I'm so much help!

This past week was a really good week and the Lord is progressing that work right along. 

The biggest news is that this next Saturday Kine will be baptized!  It is really exciting and I am so happy for her.  It is kind of funny because nobody is really sure if she ever really was baptized as a girl and so she has been going to church for like 7 years as a non-member haha.  It definitely was one of the easier teaching experiences I’ve had on the mission haha.  She will be baptized by our branch president on Saturday.

Baby Dajon :) 

The Kejon family.

Also this week we had so many people show up for church and I can see just in the short time how much the Lord is inspiring the leadership of the branch and the members here in Springdale.  When you look at our ward list it is quite daunting to see 600 less active members, it is a lot to take in as far as Home Teaching goes as well and so it has been great to be part of the work here.  There are so many part-member families that I can see joining in baptism and then heading to the temple some day. 

Jason is doing great.  He still reads the Book of Mormon and is keeping a study journal and he is just an awesome kid.  He will be baptized shortly after I leave which I will be sad to miss but very happy for him.

This next Sunday I will be giving a talk in Marshallese haha.  It has been so fun to learn a second language and I have felt so blessed by the Lord in the short amount of time that I have been able to learn it.  I can now understand people when they speak to me and have conversations that are fluid and not choppy at all and I plan to continue learning the language after my mission.

Exchanges with Cherrington.

Also a big Happy Birthday to my Dad who turns 39 today!!!  I love you pops and hope you have a great day and hope that you are ready for some serious backyard ball soon haha!

Take this movie bruh!

 Love you all I hope you have a great week!

Elder Green

WEEK 9 SPRINGDALE (WEEK 102 OF MISSION)

Hello everybody!!! Hope you all are having a great week and that you are just as happy as can be.  

We had what you might call a veryy blesseeddd week.  We virtually have just been walking ourselves right into perfect situations to baptize people which has been wonderful.  Two families in our ward have had teenage kids move from the Marshall islands to here who just haven’t been baptized yet even though they have been going to church for a long time so that is always exciting.  Their baptism should be my last Saturday here in the branch.

Other than that, Jason is still progressing and is doing great.  We have been going over and reading the Book of Mormon together which is great because we get to practice our Marshallese with him correcting us, and also his testimony builds while doing it.  He told us that he knows the Book of Mormon is true now and that now it’s just getting himself to feel ready for baptism.

The branch still continues to be the nicest people you could ever imagine. We are seeing a lot of progress from the inside out, which is our whole goal.  We have been having some of the adult leaders coming with us on exchanges which is great and our next goal is to help get Branch Council started etc.  It is really exciting because there is so much work waiting to be done here!

Something super cool was I got a surprise visit from one of my old companions and it was super cool to get to see him.  He was in town for a wedding out here and we had a lot of good laughs etc of course. 

Mikey's Trainer who's been home a few months, Eli Hess.

Love you all.  I hope you have a great week!

I read a scripture in 1 Nephi 19:9

9 Im laļ in, kōn nana ko aer, naaj ekajet E bwe ej men pata; kōn menin rej den̄ļo̧ke E, im E ej kōtļo̧k e; im rej ubrare E, im E ej kōtļo̧k e. Aaet, rej em̧m̧ōje E, im E ej kōtļo̧k e, kōn iakwe in jouj eo An im kōn kijenmej eo An kōn ro nejin armej.

I know you can’t read that so look it up in English and read it for yourself and think about how the Savior’s example teaches us how to get over our challenges.

Love E green!

here I (Emily) saved you the trouble ;)

9 “And the world, because of their iniquity, shall judge him to be a thing of naught; wherefore they scourge him, and he sufffereth it; and they smite him, and he sufffereth it.  Yea, they spit upon him, and he suffereth it, because of his loving kindness and his long suffereing towards the children of men.”

WEEK 8 SPRINGDALE (WEEK 101 OF MISSION)

iokwe iokwe ej et mour? 

I hope everybody had a great week.  We had a lot of fun and success here. One big problem however is that the ward really needs to be strengthened from the inside out.  With everybody in our ward virtually being converts there is a lot of strengthening in our ward to do.

There are over 600 members on our ward roster and about 80 on average.  We have realized that we needed to refocus our efforts.  It has been tough aligning rides for investigators etc.  When really the ward has a lot of people for us to work with already.  A lot of part-member families and with tight knit families all over with a lot of non-members we need to just refocus our efforts on working with ward members more.

The language is still going okay, I feel like I have almost hit a road block but hopefully I will get over the hump and start to have it click.  I can teach the Restoration and the Gospel of Jesus Christ and I have helped with a little translation here and there but I really need a lot more practice.  Elder Wisden is a genius though and is catching up to speed with me very quickly! 

We had a really cool experience this week. We are really wanting to baptize to help inspire the branch etc.  But it has been hard with a lot of marriages and divorces that still need to be finalized with families before they can be baptized.  However, this past week we had two girls move from the Marshall Islands, both who live with active member families and who are ready to be baptized soon!  I am really excited and grateful God answered our prayer!

I love you all.  I am so proud of all my friends that have completed their missions or will shortly!  I would like to especially give a shoutout to my best friend Jared Holman who I owe a lot of me being out here on my mission to, who will return home this week! Love you holmyyyyy 

Love you all I hope you have a great week!

Kojerraman woj

WEEK 7 SPRINGDALE (WEEK 100 OF MISSION)

iokwe iokwe! Ej et mour baamle eo ao? (hello, hello how are you my family?)

Hello everybody I cant believe I have entered this last transfer but I am doing great!!!  Elder Wisden is here and he is picking up the language fast.  A Marshallese kid living in Washington was just assigned to come here and be a missionary speaking Marshallese and so everybody is really excited to finally have a native speaker here. 

Looks like a serious companionship!

Elders Durrant, Mikey, Smith and Radford.

Fun in the car with
Radford, Smith, Durrant and Mikey.

We had an awesome week, Jason is doing really well still, he is ready to be baptized he is just waiting on feeling like he is ready and so that is great!!!

Dickson and Grace we are just working on getting a marriage certificate and then getting their family in town for the baptism!  It is really exciting, we find so many new people every day out here just because of the open and humble hearts of the Marshallese people

I am starting to feel more and more comfortable with the language, I can finally understand what people are saying to me haha and I can reply and not sound ridiculous it’s been nice.

We had another member have a Kemem at the church this Saturday night and it was absolutely insane haha.  I danced with my branch mission leader’s wife and we got some of the coolest necklaces given to us as the guests of honor and ate a lot more fish and all the native food I love.  It was really awesome!  Elder Wisden is settling in I think and I will miss old Smithy Boy but I am excited for this last transfer!

 

Mikey and Elder Wisden at the Kemem.

Love you all,

Elder Green

WEEK 6 SPRINGDALE (WEEK 99 OF MISSION)

Mikey didn't have time to write a group letter today.  It was his last transfer and he was super busy.  He got a new companion named, Elder Wisden, that he really likes and he says he is really smart and will do well with the Marshallese language.

When Sister Loveland was talking to Todd about Mikey's foot a couple weeks ago she said that she thought Mikey would finish out is mission in Springdale and train someone to take over that could stay there a long time and keep the work with the Marshallese moving forward.

Mikey said he is doing great!  I asked him if he needed anything and he said his basketball shoes are getting pretty worn out, haha.

I had a bridal shower for our neighbor, Lizzie Hunsaker, who just happens to be marrying President Loveland's nephew so the Lovelands' daughter (also named Lizzie) attended the shower.  It was so fun to get to meet her and talk to her.  She was such a sweetheart and knew some funny stories about Mikey from when she has visited her parents on their mission.  Such a small, small world!!!

Lizzie Loveland (President Loveland's Daughter) at our house!!!

WEEK 5 SPRINGDALE (WEEK 98 OF MISSION)

Hellooooo my dear friends and family iakwe iakwe! 

The Marshallese is going okay.  I am still trash but I am starting to be able to distinguish different words and make out what people are saying... as far as me speaking it and pronouncing things correctly, I still has a lot of work to do!

But big news.  So this week two Marshallese speaking missionaries from the OKC mission came over to our mission and are staying with us and teaching us the ins and outs of serving Marshallese.  One is named Elder Oberender.  He is from Cali and is on scholarship to play volleyball at BYU when he goes home!  He is like 6 foot 7 and is very, very good at Marshallese.  He has been speaking it for almost two years now.  He has been a huge step in helping me learn the language and we are so grateful here in our branch for him coming to help us.

The next missionary is Elder Lazuras and he is from the Marshall Islands!!!  He is from the Island Majuro and he has been on his mission almost a year now and he is really good at English for only speaking it a year.  Everybody here absolutely loves him and he has a ton of family and old friends here in Springdale and of course he speaks great Marshallese and is a huge help with us in teaching people etc... it has been going really well!

We found a lot of new people this past week as well as continue to see progression in our investigators we have.  Dickson and Grace were supposed to be baptized but we need to get record of their marriage or go get a certificate from the courthouse here so things have kind of stalled.  But their faith hasn’t.

Romeo and his wife Tata are awesome!  This week Tata said she just felt pulled to come out and join the lessons when before she was resisting listening because of her previous faith in a different church. Them and their family are doing awesome! 

Other than that things are great. I got a chance to speak Swahili again this past week. The missionaries in Fayeteville found some Congolese refugees and it was an awesome miracle when we went to go teach them.  I was on an exchange with Elder Roberts, my old companion, and he had a general idea of where they lived but there were a lot of complications in finding their address and also we were just on foot in a very large city.  After walking ten miles haha we found the home of a lady named Heli, a refugee that I got the chance to speak with.  However, her family was gone, she was Muslim, and did not let us in to teach her.  We left feeling pretty down and like we had failed.  Well on our way out to go home we walked this random way and across the parking lot were two black men wearing flip flops (a dead give away of refugees) so me and Elder Roberts shouted JAMBO!  They both turned with huge smiles and replied, “Habari yako??” (whats your news) haha and we got to speak with them and found a whole bunch of new people who they can teach in Fayetville because these two 20 year old young men have all the connections and phone numbers to all refugees in Fayetville!

Anyway it has been a great week!  I hope yours has as well!  Happy

Fourth of July last week!!!

Love you all 

Elder Green