April 5, 2011

The church here is so new that many things aren’t working.  Their hearts are in the right place, but they need to be taught.  Relief Society was very interesting to say the least.  After twenty minutes of waiting, one of the Relief Society counselors showed up.  The lesson hadn’t been assigned, so one of the young Sister missionaries just got up and taught on the spur of the minute.  The mission president wants us, as senior missionaries to be assigned to a ward and do shadow leadership to help teach them how to function. I am really excited about that.  I want to learn to speak well enough to teach without an interpreter, but we will start teaching in English as soon as the church handbooks get here.

The people sing with all of their hearts in Marshallese and we sing in Marshallese too.  It is a good way to learn the pronunciation of the words.

We work in the office all week and I spend a lot of my time entering the convert baptisms into the church system.  The stack of baptism papers was huge when I got here and I am just making a dent after three weeks.  The missionaries here are doing so well, we have attended two of the baptisms, but soon found that we couldn’t get to all of them.

We are enjoying the young missionaries.  It is almost like we are surrogate mothers and fathers for them, and they are always so happy to come into the office and see us.