Another Week -Still Pushing Ahead

14 July 2014 Bora Bora

Resort on one of the motus

This week we finally visited the other side of the island. Well, we had visited Anau, but we had never been completely at the end of Anau. So we biked completely to the other side and it was pretty awesome. It’s the side with all the resorts, 4 seasons, Talaso, St. Regis, there’s one other one but I don’t remember the name. Not very many people as well. The road is also right next to the ocean, with a rocky cliff on the island side. It’s really beautiful and peaceful. It took FOREVER to get out there though, maybe an hour and a half?

This week we recommited to try to talk to more people. So we went into this sketchy dirt road out on the other side of the island and ran into an awesome family. We shared our message and gave him a Book of Mormon. He actually said he was super interested in reading it. The only problem right now is the Heiva. It’s a large cultural festival held every night this month. It's actually just another excuse to get blind drunk, I've just nicknamed it Babylon Festival. It starts at sundown and goes till 3 or 4 in the morning. Alors, everyone is too busy sleeping, or to busy heiva-ing to do lessons! July and Christmas are the two dead seasons for missionary work here in Tahiti. Apparently everyone works at it as well. So in other words people aren't really interested this time of year.

The prayers seem to be working, Monia's husband started coming to the lessons out of nowhere. He also came to church yesterday, it was pretty awesome. It would be awesome if you could pray for a family whose name is Tropée. They are a family we've recontacted who were going to get married and baptized, and then the father stopped everything. We've started the lessons encore, and things are going well- but we want them to be successful this time.

President Bize is really awesome. It seems there will be less of a Mission president/missionary wall. He's French but he's been living in the US for a while. He's also going to make sure that foreign missionaries take this opportunity to learn English. Since he learned his English with his English companions, and it helped him a ton later on and he wants that for all non English speaking missionaries. As well, they reported the apostles are going to make some changes focused on teaching more for conversion, as well as focusing more on reactivation of inactive and new convert members. I’m interested to see what will happen.

If you have a Preach my Gospel, read in chapter one the section titled The Restoration. It’s pretty powerful and will help you share the gospel with others, as well as the most important things that need to be made known.

Ok, I love you all!

Elder Molinari

Pictures to follow, again....

7 July 2014 Bora Bora

This is very frustrating that I can't send any pictures. The Tahiti Church IT department thinks that USBs will destroy MLS....Oh well. It’s just a little ironic that I’m at Bora Bora, one of the most beautiful places in the world and it’s so difficult to send photos.

I have just been getting so unlucky with flat tires this week; which culminates in long walks back to the house. The tires on my “new” bike need to be replaced. Our house is on the west side of the island and our secteur is on the east side, with a mountain in between. EVERYDAY we bike all the way to the other side of the island, but since it’s absolutely stunning I don’t complain.

There is only one church building on the whole island. Actually, it’s more like 2/3 of a building because part of the building was destroyed recently by the landslide. Two wards meet in it. Yes, the members from our secteur have to come to the opposite side of the island to attend church. The first ward meets at 8 in the morning, our ward meets at 12. You can’t overlap the meetings because there’s no room. I have no idea what they are going to do after they create a third ward to meet there. 4-7 church anyone? They have a bus to go get people, but as you can imagine only the people that ride have any idea how it works. So because it’s sooo far away most of the members become inactive, or go to the protestant church, BECAUSE ITS CLOSER. Oh, boy is it interesting here.

Tomorrow we are all going to Raiatea for a conference de Zone avec (ed. note: with) the new president. Super excited!!!!! Sadly, we are only going to be there for a day. But it’s better than nothing.

I think the bishop is almost our friend, we just have to land a reunion coordination (ed. note: coordination meeting) and we will be well off. We've enacted a plan to reactivate the inactives in our ward (300 I think). We have visits that are programmed every Tuesday night. In the auxiliary meetings the presidency should prayerfully choose families’ and individual’s names to give Tuesday night.

Then the presidencies and any member that wants to, comes Tuesday. We have the ward divided up into zones and we make groups, then put the names the presidencies supplied on the board, then we go visit 1 or 2 families and come back and report. That way bishop is up to date with the family’s needs and people can offer help that are there.

At least that’s how we did it at Raiatea. Even though we have close to no one Tuesday I hope once we have a meeting we can really set it up. The only thing that we've never gotten to fully work is the auxiliary meetings, oh well.

[Editor’s note: The preceding three paragraphs will not make much sense to many of you. Allow me to try to simplify things by saying – they are targeting and visiting members who stopped coming to church in hopes of rekindling a flame inside them and inviting them back to church.]

I need everyone to pray for a couple of people. They are ready to be baptized but are being blocked by their conjoint (ed. note: de facto or common-law spouse). Their names are Jean-Jacques, and Monia. Their conjoints’ names are Marie-Claude and Robert. We really want to fix a baptism, but the other side’s heart is INCREDIBLY hard.

Thanks a bunch!

Love you all!

Elder Molinari

Another Week at Bora

30 June 2014 Bora Bora

Lagoon de Bora on my boat ride from the airport to the island.

Well it turns out that it seems like there is a lot of work to do in ALL our assignments.

Let's try to describe the situation here at Bora...They are about to separate into 3 wards, but they are still trying to figure out how they are going to do it. Normally you split a ward by the number of tithe payers, but here they want to do it by area, because it just won’t work in the more rural part of the island. It was actually supposed to already happen, but has been pushed off for a while. There are a LOT of inactive members, like 2 times the ward’s attendance number of active members. So step one; we're going to reboot the crashed reactivation program before we worry about anything else.

We have a pretty good number of amis (ed. note: friends), but we are going to have to work to get them to progress. They are too used to missionaries just coming, visiting and then not setting any habits. So we are going to work til all the investigators read the Book of Mormon and then pray daily. It’s a very big difference from Tiapa where all our amis read what we asked them to and prayed. We have some solid familes that we have recontacted, who are REALLY ready to be baptized- now let’s just grow the faith to be able to say yes.....Let’s just say, we need to sound the alarm because there are quite a few people "sleeping through the restoration".

For this past week, we did a TON of biking out to Matira and Anau every day. It's a pretty good haul out there as well. But we get to see the BEAUTIFUL - EVERYTHING. So I'm not really bothered. 

We ate at this pizzeria at Matira and it was delicious, then the French owner gave us 2 more pizzas on the house. We ate way too much pizza. Like I said before, I am EXTREMELY more appreciative of normal sector sizes since being in tiny Tiapa. We managed to find 8 new investigators last week, and we hope to find more this week. It’s pretty nice.

Not a good shot of Matira beach. It goes on and on.

I forgot how nice the islands were, and how most people will talk to you and be friendly. I'll try to send more pictures during the week if I have the chance.

Ok, Have a good week, love you all!

Elder Molinari

Bora Bora bum bum bum da da bum bum bum da da

23 June 2014 Bora Bora

You'll have to see if you can find the Bora Bora song on You Tube. I'll have to send pictures later - we are in the clerk’s office emailing, and it’s not allowed to use USB drives here; mostly because they think ANY USB key will bring viruses and crash the computer...non tech savvy people (rolls eyes). By later I mean later today.

Approaching Bora Bora from the east.

We flew into Bora and it was excellent. The island looked beautiful. I thought Raiatea had a lot of blues in the lagoon, but I was sorely mistaken. Bora won. The Airport is on one of the motus around the island, so we got to take the boat- and it was awesome! there are actually 6 Elders on Bora right now; 3 sectors, Anau, Faanui, and Vaitape. The problem is there is only 2 wards. 



They were supposed to divide into 3 wards this month - but it got pushed to the end of July. So we've been going around as companionships of 3 and not 2. 6 elders also means that there are 6 Elders in 1 house. It’s pretty crowded; we all sleep on the floor with super old sketchy mattresses, lots of mosquitoes. Its everything I wanted it to be. 

A view of Bora Bora from the north

It's so nice to be back in the islands, long bike rides, beautiful views. In our sector in Anau we have all those bungalow hotel things - and all the members work at them, so one day we will go visit. We also have Matira Beach in our sector. You can just hit Google to see what that means. It’s pretty awesome.

Matira Beach

Other news I'm not sure I've been in a ward that works yet - that pattern continues - BUT at this point I'm used to it and know what to do. It’s also incredible to be in a sector that takes more than an hour to traverse :)

ok. Expect photos later today.

[Note from editor: No photos were sent. These are taken from the internet, but are the places to which he refers. I believe the background picture behind all of this is Matira Beach as well.]

Love you all!

Elder Molinari

Transfers!!!!!

16 June 2014 Tiapa Paea

Well I got my call Thursday and I will be leaving Tiapa Wednesday morning.

I got transferred out to Bora Bora!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So excited.

Maybe its because I took all those photos of Bora Bora at Raiatea. I’ll be serving in the Anau sector - which is HUGE. I'm pretty hyped to have a reasonably sized sector again. What makes it even better is I'll be serving with Elder Peterson. I served in the same zone as him when I was at Raiatea, he was at Vaiaau, so we already know each other and we are pretty good friends. Im excited for the trip because the airport is on a Motu around the island - which means I get to take the boat to the main island! :)

Apart from transfers not much occurred this week, just a normal week of lessons and stuff. 

One of the members had an air rifle and we shot mangos in the tree with it. As you can imagine it doesn’t knock the mangos down, so there are tons of mangos with tiny holes in them. I nearly got one down by shooting the tiny vine, but it didn’t cut it enough!

In other news I'm very close to figuring out how to solve a Rubicks cube, a member gave one to Elder Smith and I've managed to figure out how to do 2 layers, independently.

Here is a nice video for Father's Day:

https://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2013-01-002-earthly-father-heavenly-father?category=mormon-messages/mormon-messages-2013&lang=eng&cid=HPTU061014222

I really enjoyed Alma chapters 11-13 or maybe 14 as well. Read with the temple in mind and it’s pretty interesting. I particularly liked the teachings on the priesthood and the pre-mortal life Alma gives in I think chapter 13. 

Ok - have a good week!

Love you all

Elder Molinari

Waterfalls and Birds

9 June 2014 Tiapa Paea

This is part of our sector that we visit a lot.

Well, this week will be the last week of training. I don't want to say anything about transfers because I might jinx something. This week was a little slow, BUT we managed to fix a baptismal date and marriage of one of our investigators thanks to A LOT of divine help. We finished teaching about the plan of salvation and it just clicked for him. There were a lot of things that clicked for me too. We taught it in a series of 3 lessons and it was probably the best we have ever taught it, mostly because he read the chapters in the Book of Mormon we gave him every night.

Before this series of lessons the Plan of Salvation lesson always seemed to me like a really long lesson full of a lot of rather disconnected elements. Now after the string of chapters we gave him, and seeing it right in a row, it was incredible how logical the whole thing is; even the Creation and Fall. The whole thing rests on the two types of death; spiritual and physical, and how Christ's atonement overcame the two. Those two deaths are the stumbling blocks for every living being. It was also interesting that we were sent here to learn and progress and we do that by using agency to choose and then learn the difference between good and evil.

I had an inspiring lesson where I was helped to realize that we learn the difference 2 ways: by following commandments or by partaking. The commandments tell us ahead of time what is bad, so we can learn the difference by following them, and receiving blessings. Conversely, we can partake of the bad and have unwanted short or long term consequences. This is true for people that don’t even realize they are following commandments as well. So in effect, everyone learns something in the end, whether they want to or not. Thought that was interesting. Anyways we finished that, taught the Loi de chasteté and engaged for marriage and baptism the 26 of July. He didn’t even hesitate when he said yes. It was a miracle.

What else did we do...still trying to find people to teach...finding people to teach is like trying to find a perfect pearl.

We went on a hike today that was pretty awesome. It rained ALL day yesterday so we thought the waterfall would be a little more cool than the flop it was last time we went. However, when we were about an hour in it started pouring out. We got so wet, but it was awesome because it kept us a little cold. The waterfall still was just ok as far as waterfalls go, but it was fun being soaked.

It was raining really hard when we got to the waterfalls

All wet!

We were hoping for better pictures. I promise it was only knee deep.

When we returned from the hike, we discovered two birds in our house. 

I tamed one.

I recommend 2 Nephi 2 and 9 again, as well as Alma 40 and 34. They are some of my favorite chapters as far as doctrine goes. We had Stake Conference this weekend and it was pretty awesome. President Sinjoux gave a killer talk, he had a phrase that I REALLY liked, and came as an answer to lots of pondering about how to describe what makes our Church unique. I had already thought to talk about modern Revelation and prophets and stuff, but I needed something with a little more punch. Well he gave it to me, and I really liked it. It sounds cooler in French. 

"We don't teach interpretations of the Bible, we teach pure truth revealed by God himself."
-P. Sinjoux

Ok. Love you all.

Elder Molinari

Another Week of Celebrations

2 June 2014 Tiapa Paea

Not sure really where this week went. Not much to report on this week. We drove around a lot because we had lots of baptismal interviews to do in the other secteurs. I finally figured out how to do the handbrake start; it wasn't as exciting as I thought it was going to be. I had some kind of weird cold all this week, so I've been super tired and my nose is always dripping and plugged up. It's a little better now.

This morning we went to a skate park while everyone was at school. So it was empty. We didn't have skateboards so we used our bikes!

Don't ask.

Made it!

Elder Smith

Elder Smith et moi

We had to go for an epic shot after

Ok, This E-mail took a while to write because I got really distracted. Elder Calves and Elder White came to us while we were emailing, saying they needed help moving the dryer at the sisters’ house. 

So we went over there, and I was rather confused because the dryer should be pretty light. Then they said they needed to move it to the terrace of the house, so I followed them and voila! It was actually a surprise birthday party! The whole zone was there. It was pretty fun. In Tahiti there’s this weird tradition where you sing happyu birthday in French, then Tahitian, and sometimes English. So after that was done I blew out the candles and we ate. It was a nice surprise. 

Yesterday, my actual birthday, I celebrated in two places. One of them I didn't even know was going to happen.

If I get transferred I'm going to miss this zone, it's super unified. I think that’s one thing I've learned from Elder Calves. He's my zone leader, and he was my zone leader at Raiatea. He is always doing something with the zone, even if its poorly planned sometimes, or not much of an activity. The zone spends a lot of time together on P-days, and I think it helps the missionary work a lot by keeping all our morales up.

Here is a link to the 170 Year Celebration we were in last week:

http://www.mormonnewsroom.org.nz/article/mormons-celebrate-170-years-in-the-south-pacific

Sadly we lost our Tahitian lesson with the Mami. She’s really busy with wedding preparations this month for a 400 person wedding. I think she’s in charge of flowers. So she put lessons on hold for this month. But we still go by to visit. Those lessons that we did REALLY I mean REALLY helped my Tahitian improve. ‘Cus we mostly just read the Book of Mormon and then I would connect it with the lesson topic. So I was getting a mini pronunciation lesson when she would read the Book of Mormon. Maybe I didn’t have a lot of baptisms in Tiapa, but I’ve progressed in a ton of other areas, so I'm grateful I was put here.

I don’t have much more else to share.

Love you all!

Elder Molinari