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
