Slaves and Slumps

Dear Family,

I'll begin this week's news with how the work in Palau is progressing. As you might have guess by my witty, alliterative title, it isn't. At least not very quickly. I thought we were on a roll, we had like five baptisms scheduled for January. However, this is how things played out:

Investigator #1) Drunk on New Year's Day (at night) when we showed up to teach him, and haven't been able to see him since.

Investigator #2) Told us he knew everything was true, then went M.I.A. and we couldn't get a straight answer from his family.

Investigator #3) Thought of yet another reason to postpone her baptism. It's now the 23rd instead of the 16th - we'll see.

Investigator #4) Her mom told us we can only come every other weekend because they're Catholic and her daughter needs to focus on school.

Recent Convert #1) Ran away from home shortly after her baptism, and we haven't seen her since. Her mother suspects her to be smoking Marijuana with her wicked cousin.

Recent Convert #2) Doing great, but missed church because she had to go to the hospital.

So as you can see, it hasn't been the greatest of weeks. But that's okay - we all have good weeks and bad weeks.

Moving on to the "Slaves". So here in Palau, some families hire a "Domestic Helper" or "DH". At first I assumed it was just a maid or something like that. This week I learned that this is not the case. A family's DH is responsible for the child care, cooking, housekeeping, laundry, grocery shopping, and really any other errands or duties you can think of. The sad part is that they get paid anywhere from $1-$2.50/hr or less. Believe it or not that's less than the average minimum wage (Palau doesn't have a standardized minimum wage, at least that I'm aware of) which is about $3.65/hr. With the price of goods here, I'm flabbergasted (yes, I used that word) that people here can even survive, let alone provide for their families. It's really a sad situation.

And yes, I do have a can opener. In fact, just today I discovered a hand mixer in our apartment. Not an electric one, but the pioneer kind - like the one we had in the University house that was all rusted and I think was more of an antique decoration than actually functional.

I've really upped the quality of my breakfasts this last week. I started making french toast (which I kind of guessed at - I don't really know what goes in the egg-milk mixture or how much) and pancakes which have been just delicious - if I can toot my own horn a little bit here.

Well Elder Stanley is done with his email, and is waiting for me, so I should probably go.

I love you all and thanks for praying for me.

Love,

Elder Barlow