Report from Haida Gwaii

Hello, family!

Whew! Sounds like it's been a pretty crazy week for everybody back home! The skiing in Eastern BC looks like it was fantastic. I would always be envious of the people in Vernon that came to the door with windburned faces and thermals after a day of skiing. There's a member in Vernon that I think is an orthopedic surgeon and at his practice he schedules all his patients in the afternoon so he can go skiing every morning. Probably not a bad way to go!

Well, the work in Haida Gwaii has just been great. The people here are great. It's a very small place, and everybody has had the missionaries at their door a lot over the past 2 years, and so a lot of people aren't very receptive to your typical missionary approach on the doorstep. People are very friendly and talkative, and a lot are very willing to accept help with yardwork or splitting wood or whatever else they need to have done, and so you have to find different ways to start talking with people and sharing the gospel with them. As a missionary you're kind of watched like a hawk. We were heading back from washing our truck at one of the member's homes, and somebody walking past looked at us confused and asked us why we weren't "in uniform". Then half a second later he just said "Oh yeah, it's Tuesday, your day off!" And then kept going. People know that our rules are that we can't visit people of the opposite gender without someone of our own gender with us, and they'll use that to their advantage. "You can't share your message with me! I'm here all by myself and you can't come in!" It kind of creates a hubbub whenever there is a switch in the missionaries here, and so the fact that 2 new ones moved in created a bit of a stir. It's a pretty interesting culture!

We're still working with a lot of miracle people here in Haida Gwaii. I might have mentioned before, many years ago churches on Haida Gwaii had programs that would forcibly take children from their families and put them in "Residential Schools", where all sorts of abuse would take place. The LDS church had a "Lamanite Placement Program" which would place children from Haida Gwaii with families spread throughout Canada or at church schools like BYU, but it required the parent's permission, and to keep their kids away from other programs that were abusive, families would beg the church to take their children. So in general, people are relatively friendly towards the church, but there are a lot of the people here that don't really distinguish between churches. So it's really cool that we're able to meet with Sid, who is a chief, and his wife Cindy. They're really great people. Sid is always joking around with other people at his house that we think he would make a great "Mormon bishop" (he would). People are a lot friendlier towards us, because they know that at least Sid likes us! They take really good care of us, too. Sid sent us home the other day with a big bucket of crabs. I've never eaten legit crab before, but it's good! He said that in Vancouver one crab would cost $30, and he gave us like ten.

The culture on Haida Gwaii is great, too. In first nations stories, ravens play very prominent positive roles, and so even though they just tear into garbage and make messes, everybody loves them a lot. You never throw away food that goes bad, you just set it out so the ravens eat it. We had a bunch of food that was given to us that started to go bad, so we left it outside, and there was a swarm of probably 40 ravens outside our apartment. Not going to lie, we were scared to leave. But the Lord looked out for us, and we made it out. :)

Other than that, we're just looking on all obscure corners of the islands for people to teach! Riding ferries around, looking in all the different towns, and talking with a lot of unique people. We're teaching a few people that are hippies that came to escape the rest of the world, an Inuit artist who carves whalebone for a living, some loggers, and lots of awesome first nation people. We're hoping that the snow up here melts soon. When it doesn't look so cold outside, people will hopefully be more willing to jump in our baptismal font (the ocean).

And we have a really exciting week coming up! We're going to be flying down to Vancouver (and flying back up in less than 24 hours) for a mission conference with Elder Christofferson! We're super excited for it. The whole mission is fasting the day before, and then we're just going to have a spiritual feast the next day. It'll probably be the only time for months and months that we'll be off the island.

Well, hope that you all have a great week! Thanks for the emails and support!

Donga dii K'uuga ga!

Elder Blotter