Mauri Everybody!
Life still goes on in the islands! I have so much fun here. This week
I was blessed to eat mud, but first a story. Many years ago there was
a famine in Beru. No one had anything to eat and everyone was starting
to starve to death. Then this old woman had a dream. She dreamt that if
she and others ate the fungus that grows on top of the mud they would
be saved. Somehow it had the right vitamins that the island survived
the famine. As a result, Beru is now famous for eating mud (they don't
have a word for strange red fungus that grows on mud). So on Thursday
we were at Tiiwini's house (always our
favorite, he'll get baptized next week)
and he asked us if we'd been
to Beru and eaten the mud. We said that we hadn't yet, so he told us
he hadn't either, but a friend of his just went to Beru and he asked
him to bring some mud back. So we shared a lovely snack of mud. This
mud was prepared very well. Usually they just drink it, but it was
baked into a cake with sugar and flour and tasted really good. It was
a light pink and had a sweet flavor. However it felt like a rock in my
stomach and made eating not my favourite thing.
Cool thing about life in the islands though, they drink coconuts here.
Drinking coconuts are called moimoto. They are just young coconuts
that still have a lot of milk inside. You have to take off the husk,
then on the top of the coconut are three holes. Usually one is bigger
than the others, so you open it up (using a small knife or your thumb
nail) and drink. They are about the size of a softball or a little
bigger and have tons of liquid in them and taste amazing. The only
problem is that they contain a natural chemical that clears out the
system really well. Yesterday I was given 4 in less than a hour. Lets
just say that it cleared me out really fast and now I have no more mud
problems!
The people here say that my stomach is small because I have to pee all
the time, but I will literally drink quarts of liquid in a couple hour
period. It is rude culturally to not give someone a drink or a meal
(usually we can keep it to just a drink) if they visit you. It is even
worse to not finish the said drink, so sometimes we drink lots. they
don't have a word for bladder, so will just use thermos instead. So
when I ask to be excused, they say to go fast so my Thermos won't
explode. They don't really have lots of jokes, just overall witty
people.
I don't really have any super huge spiritual story for this week, more
just a flow of my ponderings. I have been puzzling the prospect of
faith for a long time. At first it was for a fun way to teach it
(still looking for better ideas than trust falls). Then it moved to
what actually is it. So one day this week we were biking to Borotiam
in the rain. It is about an hour ride and within minutes we were
soaked. It is against culture to go into someone's house wet, but they
will often let you in, it's just weird. We know this so we were quite
concerned with the fact that we were biking in the rain. I said, 'I
have faith that the rain will stop.' but then I thought, is this faith
or just some random hope. So I decided that I hoped that the rain
would stop, but it turned to faith when I/we decided to bike into
it. But then we asked, ' is this faith in the rain or faith in Jesus
Christ, because only the 2nd one does any good'.' So after some
thought we decided that it was in the rain, but we could change it to
being in Christ. We know that God wants us to teach his children, and
he also knows if they will be offended by us coming in the rain. So we
decided to go to every house trusting that either the rain will stop
or he will soften their hearts to let us in and accept our message.
Basically that if we do what we said we would do he would make it all
work out. I discovered later that this was us turning the situation
over to the Lord. So we went through the day and had a good amount of
success. We taught 7 lessons, while not a record still a wonderful
day. He helped us change our order of people, so that by the most
important ones we were dry and all went well. So basically, faith is
trusting that God will make it all work out, even if it is
uncomfortable in the moment. I would love further advice here because
my understanding is still small and very hard to express like this.
I love teaching and spreading the word out here in Abaiang.
I love you all.
Elder Morley
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