Haida Gwaii!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Family,

Well, transfer calls have come and gone, and so now it's confirmed that my last area is going to be the beautiful islands of Haida Gwaii. I'm super excited about that, because there's just so much going on and the people here are just like family at this point, I love serving in small places, because it's so easy to get very close with the people here. And I have spent a lot of time in the tiny places in the far Northern reaches of the mission! The Terrace district conference is going to be at the end of May, and I realized that of the 4 possible district conferences for me to be in attendance of in Terrace, I will have gone to 3 of them! I missed one district conference because I was in Vernon, but other than that, I've been at every district conference in Terrace. You just gotta love the North.

So. Anyways. Miracles. I talked about Alma Rose a little bit last week. She's great. She lives inside of what looks like is a motel (because it was a motel, but some guy bought it and turned it into an apartment complex) that we felt like we should try to talk to everybody inside of anyways. It's on the busiest stretch of the biggest town in the islands, so kind of right under the missionaries' noses. Anyways. We were teaching her, and she had said joking that what drives her life is "coffee", and she told us she drinks 2-3 12 cup pots of coffee a day. So we were pretty concerned about teaching her the Word of Wisdom. In the lesson, we were kind of cautious and were prepared to make a plan to help her quit over a period of time, but she just dwarfed our faith and committed to live it on the spot. We left that lesson with bags of coffee and tea containers. Lessons like that are the best. In any case, we moved her baptismal date forward to May 10th. People like her are just solid. We just taught her tithing, and even though she's in a tight financial situation, she had no problem committing to live it. Some people just have the strongest faith!

In any case, we're really excited about Alma-Rose. She's also really into genealogy and held a genealogy workshop yesterday, and so she's all about that. We were allowed to go to it, and when we went she was showing some of the online genealogy sites. When she went to familysearch.org, it was just awesome. I was feeling some church pride. That has negative connotations... maybe church patriotism is a better way to put it. :) What an awesome resource that is! Our church is really cool. It does really cool stuff. Also, Mother/Grandma/whomever else has done a lot of work on it, thanks for doing so much work on genealogy! I brought the fan chart that I have that goes back to the 128 great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents that I have, and people were really impressed by it. And then the "Spirit of Elijah" just started stirring in people's hearts and they wanted to do their genealogies, too. A lot of people then started asking questions about the church, too, at first apologetically because it was supposed to be a workshop about genealogy, but we had the chance to talk to a lot of people about what our church is about. It was awesome.

Anyways, the work is going well! We're finding lots of people to talk to. At this point we're finding in a lot of the same places that we've already found in, but every time we revisit a place, we find new people to teach. We plan to revisit areas at different times to talk to different groups of people, and between that and people's hearts softening, we manage to teach lots of new people each week. We spend a lot of time pounding the pavement (or rather, mud, moss, and muddy moss, etc) but we're certainly blessed for the time that we do. :)

The people here are so awesome, too. Sid, the chief, gave us these super nice carved wooden paddles, and Val is going to help us paint them at some point. No idea how I'm going to get that bad boy home. Val has given us some of her super awesome art, and some jewelry. And a super cool poster. People are just very generous. And people are very willing to feed us. It's a good thing that we have a treadmill now... ha ha. Last night we were just lamenting the fact that this recipe we were trying (halibut cooked in the oven at 3:50 covered in coconut milk and this asiago artichoke dip stuff. All of which was given to us by a recent convert named Ruth) wasn't finished cooking in time before we had to leave for our consecrated finding time. (We just turned the oven down to 250 and left it in there. Surprisingly, when we got back it was cooked perfectly. Miracle.) So we're out and finding, and Sid and Cindy tell us they want us to come over. And then as we're talking, they give us all this scallop fettucine. It was fantastic. And just over the course of me writing this, we got a text from Ruth telling us she has food for us. I repeat, it's a good thing we have a treadmill now.

Well! We're out here working hard. It's a beautiful place. On the occasional sunny day, the scenery is just striking. It's just a message of "God loves you". And even the liquid sunshine isn't all that bad, either. It keeps everything green. They have a saying up here, "no rain, no rainbows"! I hope that you all have an amazing week and that everything is going well! Congratulations to Jacey for scoring a goal the other day in soccer, and to Jed for doing cool stuff on the motorcycle. You'll have to show me some cool stuff. And Ness, hope stats is just going greaaaat.

Elder Blotter