Elder Connor Grant's Adventures in Tonga: WEEK 36 IN TONGA TU'ANUKU

Malo Mo e Laumalie!

Would you look at this! 2 weeks in a row where I can email! Haha Id say thats a miracle right there!!

This week has had its ups and downs, but me and Elder Harmon have discovered the coolest thing ever.

Its called 'Referrals from Heaven' (we found this in a book we found in our MQ) So what we do is we each pray individually for a little bit. And then we say a companionship pray together and ask for direction and help knowing where we should go that day. Then we take a look at our map that we made and put on the wall. We split the map up into 8 different sections (each has about 10ish houses in it) We each pick 3 areas separately and then compare and then that day we go out and visit the areas that we picked in common. We've done it about 3 times now and each time has been successful!

Thursday: We picked 'Section A' in common, so we headed down there. We were walking around for a little bit when we saw this one house. It was positioned kind of weird and kinda hard to get to so both of us kinda just thought of either passing it, or going to it around the other side. I just kinda started walking away, looking at the next house, but Elder Harmon stopped and was just starting at it. I asked him what he was thinking but he just stood there in silence for like a good 30 sec. Each of us could think of like 10 excuses to just move on and not walk up to the house, and that's how we knew that we had to! Satan is the worst and every time he knows that we are about to meet someone that we can end up helping, millions of excuses why not to talk to that person come sliding in. So, we walked up and it was this young, pregnant girl who lives by herself. We end up asking if we could talk, and she lets us in. We found out that she was baptized about a year ago over in Tongatapu and wants to come back to church but is afraid of her dad, because he hates the church and won't hesitate to hit his pregnant daughter if she comes to church. Makes ya angry huh? So we talked to her about faith and tried to give her some encouraging words. We have an appointment with her tonight but she is about to have her baby which means shell probably go back to the main island for a while so I'm not sure if we will see again before being transferred.

Friday: Got 'Section F' as our referral. So we headed down there and met with just about everyone in that area. Ended up meeting a ton of people, all of which where pretty dang nice to us and got 6 appointments set up! Now there's a very good chance that none of these appointments will go through but hey, we're just doing our job! The funny thing is we meet all of these people, and then ask our kaingalotu (members) about them and we end up finding out that they have all been members at one point or another. I'd almost say that anyone over 40, it's about a 70% chance they've been baptized.

We think that our 2 progressing investigators are both avoiding us.

One of them, we had appointments set up with him almost everyday this week and he hasn't shown up to any of them.

The other just straight up disappeared and won't answer his phone.

You may be wondering how you loose someone, on an island the size of Saratoga Springs, but trust me it happens!

This week was the Wesleyan conference and it was straight LITTT. We couldn't actually go to it, cause it's out of our area, but Longomapu was in charge of feeding EVERYONE on Tuesday. That's like 5-7 thousand people. People from overseas come to this thing, it's a big deal for them. Everyone killed all of there pigs and bulls and horses, it was crazy, and then they were up all night cooking and then the town was dead for like 2 days because everyone was sleeping.

Other random news: I have a couple false names going around the area. Like 5 people think my name is, Kalavite, and the Relief Society President and her family think my name is Kalaneti, and Bishop likes to call me Mr. Bean smh. I've reached an all time low with that one.

Bunch of random stuff but that's how the area has been recently! Moving along though!!

GUYS! Hit me with updates on your lives! 😘