11 July 2011

Family,

This has been a crazy week. We spent everyday meeting with President Mecham talking about the upcoming transfer - which is still a month away. We're losing 6 missionaries and only getting 4, so we have to close an area and replace a bunch of leadership positions. It's been kind of a headache. Usually President Dowdle would just do the transfer, and then towards the end have us check for problems and add our input. Now we're having to make way more suggestions because he doesn't know any of the missionaries. All he knows is where they've served in the past. We're nervous to say anything because as soon as we do, someone gets transferred. It's pretty crazy. But President Mecham is awesome. One of the zone leaders called because a companionship in their zone was bickering and not getting along and they wanted to talk to President Mecham. We gave them his off-island phone number and he called us back and told us that they're being foolish and need to learn to get along - or never get married. It was pretty funny, and it was just evidence to me that he's the man. We're going off-island again this week by the way. We're headed up to Saipan tomorrow and then we'll be in Kosrae all weekend, so if you don't get an email from me next week, that's why.

We've done a lot of finding this week since the investigators we have aren't really progressing for whatever reason. One has to get married, but can't until she goes to the Marshalls and back, another is waiting for his court date, and another is working double shifts at work. So we've been spending our time looking for less-active members in order to teach the other members of the family. Finding people in Guam is surprisingly much harder than the other islands. Here, people have addresses and the streets have names, so you'd think it would make things a lot easier. However, there are all kinds of people so you can't just ask anybody where they live, and even though a street will have a name, it won't be marked. Same with the houses, some will have numbers, and others won't, or they'll go completely out of order - from 15 to 732 to 109. It doesn't make any sense. So as you can imagine, finding these people has been pretty difficult. But we found one and asked for the person we were looking for, but he wasn't home. The woman we were talking to said "You're Mormons right? I want to join your church. Me and my husband." Those are the kind of things I like to happen to me when I knock on someone's door.

There is a member in our ward (she's the pianist), whose husband just moved from the states (she just got a job here, which is why she came in the first place). He's not a member but has been meeting with the missionaries for over 20 years. He talks like a Mormon, feeds us like a Mormon, everything about him feels like a run-of-the-mill member of the church (throw back to the 1950's with that phrase), but he refuses to get baptized. He claims to have a problem with Joseph Smith. Anyway, we're the latest set of missionaries to teach this guy. We're afraid he's just been putting up the same wall of defense for so long that he looks at us as just another set of missionaries trying to take a shot at it. We've only taught him twice, so we'll see how things progress from here. He did come to church yesterday, it that counts for anything.

That's about all I have time for today. I love you guys.

Love,

Elder Barlow

Pictures:
1) Vilynta - our Chuukese investigator that was just baptized last week.

2-4) Gangster Chuukese wedding. President Dowdle married them, and they rented a limo. We sat in the limo and took pictures before the wedding party came out afterward.