New P-Day

Family,

So the Area Presidency has asked that we hold our Preparation Day on Monday now (apparently most other missions do), which is why I'm writing now.

This has been a pretty exciting week. I sat down wondering what I was going to write about, but a lot more actually happened than I thought.

First of all, we were supposed to meet with a family (Less-active mother, recent-convert daughter, and 2 other non-member daughters) on Thursday night. We drove to the appointment, and the recent-convert girl was gone. We weren't too surprised since she always goes places without telling her mom (we're working on that). After about 5 minutes, the mother's sister, Fran, drove up too and told us that Meilany (the recent-convert girl) got in a car accident and was in the hospital. My companion and I rushed to the hospital, but she wasn't there, and the hospital said that they hadn't received any news of an accident. We drove back and Fran said, "No, she's not at the hospital. My brother just went to get her." Apparently Meilany and her friends were driving somewhere like 45 minutes away, got into a pretty bad accident, and then ran away because none of them had a license. Luckily no one was hurt, but we spent that night (until 9) watching church movies and singing hymns with them, just to try to keep them from getting worried.

Second, Fran's daughter (Meilany's cousin), came down with a pretty bad fever and had to be hospitalized. Fran asked us to give her a blessing, so I got to do that for her last night. It's always such an interesting experience. I've only done this a few times now, so I always stress about what to say and everything, but once the blessing starts, it's really pretty relaxing.

Third, we had our first baptism of the year! It wasn't from our area, but still encouraging nonetheless. The man who was baptized, Tobi, has a pretty colorful past, and needed 2 interviews with the mission president, but obviously passed. As they were walking into the water (he was baptized in the ocean by his house) he said, "Maybe you should hold me under for a little longer." It was pretty funny. He was confirmed yesterday, and will hopefully play a big part in helping the growth of the church here.

Lastly, I think I'm allergic to crab - at least land crab. Here in Palau, and I'm sure many other places, they have several kinds of crabs - land crab, coconut crab, mangrove crab, etc. At the baptism, Tobi provided a bunch of food. Most of it was fish and rice, but he also had a huge bucket of tarrow leaf soup. It's basically tarrow leaves boiled with coconut milk (they take ground up coconut meat and squeeze the juice out of it. It's not the stuff you drink.) and they added crab to it. It was really good (so was the fish, might I add) but then the palm of my hand got super itchy all of a sudden. I looked at it, and I had little tiny bumps all over my palm. I thought it would go away pretty quick, but I still have it 3 days later - and it's still itchy. I asked a few people about it, and they said sometimes that happens when people eat crab. I'm still not sure if that's what happened, but that's my best bet.

We're struggling more with the work here than we ever have before. My first couple of months, we had a ton of success, but it has slowly gone downhill. I'm not sure exactly why that has happened, but we're desperately trying to find new avenues. Nothing yet.

I got the newsletter today, so even though it's delayed news, it sounds like everyone is doing well.

Until next week.

Love,
Elder Barlow