I LIED!

March 6, 2016

I'm emailing right now whaaaaa!! You guys already forgot about me....

I hope everyone had a good week at homeeeee. I thought I wouldn't be
able to email for about 4ish months but I found out when I got here
that Maiana got internet literally like 2 weeks ago #blessedddd. We
were having an interesting time trying to get the email to load but we
finally got it to work. Hopefully it will be able to work most of the
time <3

ANYWAYS, I got here on Friday afternoon when I took a 10 minute plane
ride south from Tarawa. I was welcomed and then I went back to see our
hutttt. Our house is actually pretty sick. There is a small stick
house with 2 raised stick shelf things for our beds which are on
either side of the door when you walk in. We also have a stove inside
the house. I guess it's about all we need. We also have a stick
bathroom with a concrete block for the toilet. We then have a small
buia or raised open air platform type thing that you can use to sleep
on or do whatever. We are about 10 feet from the ocean. We go across
the street to get well water and we go up the street to get rain water
for drinking.

Unfortunately, we haven't had time to get out and do tons of teaching
since I've been here. We had a baptism on Saturday which was pretty
cool but took a lot of time. I then watched Elder Vaii kill a pig and
skin it as a "welcome gift" type thing for me hahah. We had a pretty
big dinner of pig with some members in a village up North to welcome
me to Maiana. Yesterday we didn't get in even 1 lesson because we held
church in 4 areas. Maiana is a big area and it's tough to bike almost
the whole island and to hold church in 4 areas. We had about 50 people
combined at church from those 4 areas.

As far as my companion, he's good. Elder Vaii is a 20 year old Samoan
who grew up in Australia. He speaks fluent Samoan and English and he
is a BIG dude. Hahah I'm not gonna put a weight on him but he's big.
He likes rugby along with killing pigs and dogs for our food here
lolz. He finished his time as a missionary this May. I will probably
be with him for a little less than 2 months because this is his last
area.

I wish I knew more but I haven't been here this long! I'm excited to
get out and teach this week so that I know more about the work and the
investigators. I'm all settled in now and all is well! Now that you
guys KNOW I have some form of email I better be hearing from you all
next week. 

<3

Elder Parrish