"Hey everyone!! Well this week has been a pretty busy and productive week. I'm happy to say that we had the BAPTISM of our investigator Yari. That's a crazy experience so I'm going to explain it in depth a little later in this email. This past Tuesday I had the opportunity to go back to Nargana on divisions. Got to hang out with my buddy Elder Brimhall. That was great. I got to know some more of the people in Nargana and he showed me this restaurant with a brilliant way of attracting peoples attention. They have a pet monkey. Hearing of this, I of course wanted to go see it for myself. It was awesome. It was chained up but given enough room to climb around and play. If you put your arm out if jumps onto you and you basically become a jungle gym. I got some awesome pics. Fun fact..if you try tickling the armpits of a monkey, it will probably start trying to bite you..haha!! I have a really funny video of that and some funny pics. The work in Carti Tupile is pretty good. We are currently teaching investigators on 5 different islands and still averaging over 30 lessons a week (not to mention we usually have more than one investigator in each lesson). Being on an island that's pretty good numbers. We currently have 8 people with baptismal dates for the 29th and a few others that are progressing and want to get baptized but have a later baptism date. Hopefully most will get baptized. I realized last night that if we do have the 8 baptisms on the 29th, in one month we will roughly have had the same number of baptisms that Carti Tupile has had in the past year. That would be awesome. I feel confident that we will have at least a few baptisms. We had 8 investigators in church this week. This week we also did a little exploration to know some of the other islands further out in our area. We took our boat out since the black tar we painted on it dried. It still leaks a little but its a lot better than it was before. We visited 3 new islands. Mulatupu, Isla Del Contador, and Nurdup. These islands are not close or easy to get to. Manually rowing in our cayuco it took us about 40 min to get to Mulatupu. There we found a positive investigator and are returning later this week to visit him. This island is fairly large and most people there don't speak any Spanish. Second, we visited Nurdup. I was surprised to find that on the tiny island there was a Jehovas witness church and nearly everyone on the island were members of that church and nearly none spoke any Spanish. I was also told that originally the Jehovas Witness church was on most islands until the Kunas banned all of them except on that tiny island. Supposedly they had a problem with the kuna government and all got kicked out. Luckily our church is still on the majority of the islands and only growing. Nurdup was over an hour away rowing and I don't think we will go there that often. But who knows. They have motor powered boats there and it wouldn't take long to get to Carti Tuple with one of those. Isla Del Contador was another little small island near Nurdup. Nobody lived there but since it was so close we decided to go check it out anyways. We rowed back to Carti Tupile in the dark at about 7pm. That was kind of a trip. I bet you can imagine how peaceful it was though. Out on the calm ocean with a beautiful view of the starts. I don't think I've ever seen so many stars in my life. It was so clear that I think I even saw some small planets. The water was so clear in the ocean that light from the moon was enough to see about 20 ft under the water. Making visible the coral reefs and fish. I occasionally would even see what appeared to be glowing eyes. Im not sure what creature that was. The baptism day was kind of crazy. It being the rainy season we've been getting absolutely flooded every day. I have 3 pants and 3 shirts with me in Kunayala and all are completely soaked right now. Im hoping they can dry a little bit. On the baptism day a huge storm hit us and we had to take shelter in the church. Eventually the storm settled enough to where we could go outside and do the baptism. However, it was risky because the area where we do the baptisms sometimes has sea urchins deeper in the water and the water was murky so we couldn't see our feet like we usually can in the water. To avoid stepping on one I had to stay closer to the shore where I've seen less. This made it difficult for the baptism though because the water only went up to my knees. Luckily, I managed to get her completely under the water and we didn't step on any sea urchins. she seemed happy afterwards and that was cool to see. Shes already one of the most faithful members right now. ha! (fun side note..my flip flops broke a couple weeks ago. I've been walking barefoot around all the islands since I don't have any. Probably will get some soon when the leaders go into the city. I haven't seen any flip flops in the stores here). I hit my one year mark this past Friday. I believe in my last email I said Thursday..eh I was tired I meant Friday. I burned one of my yellow shirts to celebrate hitting the 1 year mark. I would say white shirt but that would be lying. It was pretty gross. Oh..this Sunday was also pretty crazy. The whole island was probably under about 6 inches of water due to another massive storm. Very few people came to church. 8 of the 30 people that did come were investigators. Church was interesting because we had to wait longer for more people to show up including the branch president. He needed to do the confirmation so we didn't want to start without him. We sang a ton of hymns and stuff. trying our best so the investigators enjoyed church. In the end all turned out good. The president came and we got church done. The investigators told us they enjoyed church. Oh..I almost forgot..So the Martinez family in Yandup (family of Yari) asked us to fill up 4 MASSIVE water jugs for them in Carti Tupile where they have the pipes leading to the river. Sure enough, that same day we discovered we no longer had water in Cart Tupile. So on Sunday while we were preparing to set up church I got the 4 massive containers and managed to fill them all up in about 5 min using gutters on the church. That wasn't easy. My arms felt dead after because I had to hold them out in front of me. Luckily I was able to fill the 4 containers and we brought them to the Martinez family to have water. They were grateful for that. Well..not really sure what else to write about. I hope all of you guys have a good week!
-One picture is me and Elder Ricks with Yari before the baptism (Ricks wasn't ready but it was the best pic I had. If you cant tell, the pants I'm wearing are super tight and someone cut them shorter. Sadly I didn't have any other pants to use.)
-Me burning my yellow/white shirt on the day I hit a year in the mission.
Love you guys!!"
-Elder Hawes
- "In one pic Im dumping water on some kids that were playing under our rain catching device. They loved it and it was a lot of fun. ha!"
- "Me with a pic of the crazy monkey that kept trying to bite me. That was fun"
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