"Hey everyone! Crazy another week has already passed. Hope everyone had a good week. I'm glad to say I'm back to my full strength and feeling a lot better from the whole dengue experience. Glad its done and hopefully I don't ever get it again. This week has been a pretty good one. Was sad though that we couldn't do the baptism we had scheduled. Our investigator Yari got the chicken pox and didn't feel well. Shes good now though so were going to do the baptism this Saturday. This week I went on divisions (spent a day with another missionary other than my companion) with my district leader on an island called Nargana. Ive mentioned this island before. Its about an hour away from my island of Carti Tupile and is basically a city on an island. Except for the cars. I think one person owns a bike..at least that's what I was told. ha! There everyone speaks Spanish and wears normal clothes. Basically all the homes are made of concrete and there really isn't any stick homes. I think the reason that the island is less cultural and more "civilized" as some people say is due to the panamanian government about a 100 years ago. There was once a mini confrontation between the Kuna people and the Panamanian government. The Panamanian government tried to get the indians to give over their lands and to give up their many cultural differences. The Kunas refused and had a "revolution" as they say. Lucky for them, the United States heard about what was happening and sent a battleship to scare away the Panamanians and force them to make a peace treaty. This happened in like 1911 I think..not sure. Then San Blas A.K.A Kunayala was made an indian reservation with their own separate government. Nargana was one of the islands most effected by the government and forced to conform. Now many of the people there only speak Spanish. It was okay there but I like Carti tupile better. Today we finished fixing our wooden cayuco. 3 times this week we went out and worked on it. We were gifted this hardened block of tar from a member. They told us to cut up the block and mix it with gasoline. To let it sit some time. We followed the directions and painted the tar onto our boat when the consistency was good. Basically coated the whole bottom of the boat on both sides (inside and outside) due to all the termite damage and holes. It really sucked cleaning off our hands and feet every time. We had to use gasoline to clean our hands and then use some heavy duty soap. Cant imagine that's good for the skin. There's no gloves here. ha! Hopefully the boat works better now and wont start sinking like it was. We've been using other peoples boats all week to get around. I'm starting to understand a little more dulegaya. Ive been studying more. We went to visit the Martinez family and teach Yari the last lesson we hadn't taught and the girl that normally translates for us wasn't there. We managed to teach the word of Wisdom lesson by ourselves in dulegaya. It was kind of similar to charades. I would act like I'm smoking or drinking and say "suli." No. They understood the words coffee and tea in Spanish so we got lucky. My comp thought the best part was when I explained how eating fruits is good for the body. I said..."Bob Dummad we abeged an mar masgunned" [meaning: god wants us to eat] as I pointed at the picture of the fruits and vegetables. I pointed at the only fruit I knew on the page ( a pineapple) and said "ossi maya" which means [pinepaple is cool]. haha! My comp thought that was funny. I pointed at fruit again and then at my body and said "An mar masgunned..an mar tu tu suli" more or less meaning [we eat and we are strong]. My dulegaya isnt really that good but they understood everything I said and we covered all the information in the lesson. I also shared a short 3 min testimony in dulegaya yesterday since it was fast and testimony meeting. People understood me in everything but I say things wrong. The problem is that there really isn't much to study. I'm just learning by listening. Tough..This week we blitzkrieged an island. We went to Yandup and I turned to my comp Elder Ricks and said lets contact this entire island. Well..we got 15 new investigators that day and things are looking positive for a lot of them. Hoping we can teach them all and get some more baptisms. It was kind of funny..here you can just walk into peoples homes and its completely normal. We did that to so many different homes. A ton were just old grandmas and we would just sing hymns with a lot of them. All the little kids love it and every time they see us in our boat passing the island they say "Elder! Elder !." Oh..we also finally got water on the island again. Finally! it only took 8 days. We survived the time thanks to our rain catching system. ha! (Most people have huge water storages...we really dont) Fun side note..every storm all the little kids on the island gather underneath our rain catching contraption to bath and play. During one storm we filled up buckets and dumped the water on the kids and some of the fun adult members on the island. I would normally not do that to a member but a lot of Kunas have a sense of humor and like messing around like that. It was fun. Well..I think that's pretty much it for this week. This Thursday I'm going to hit the one year mark. I cant believe it. Time flies by so quick and from what I've been told the second goes by even quicker. I hope all of you have a good week! Love you guys!!!"
-Elder Hawes
"I'm attaching some photos..
One is a photo of the three different islands we often visit. To the right of the photo that is Yandup, in the middle is Sugdup, and to the far left is Coibita. They kind of look like they are together but they are 3 different islands."
"This is a picture of me with the random pig that I caught when I was in Coibita and messing with the kids. ha!"
"A few more photos for everyone..
- The rodent terminator"
- 'Me and some of my friends in Coibita"
- "A sign that I saw when I went to Carti Sugdup (I'm pretty sure the name Sugdup means crab island)"
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