Another 1st
Tara will be the first missionary to leave from Timor leste. She received her call to serve in the Philippines Bacolod mission. She reports to the mission Training Center in Manila on May 31st.
Her Mission call letter was of course signed by President Nelson. It Was Written in the dialect of the area that she will be serving. Even though she speaks Tagalog her and her mother had to look up several of the words in the letter.
Tara and one of the new members Azeni rotate practicing and then playing the keyboard every two weeks for sacrament meeting. When they show up they let us know what songs they are capable of playing and then we write it down so the members that don't speak English can find it in the song book.
This is our new member Januaro preparing the sacrament. We each rotate blessing and passing the sacrament each week. When I Blessed Sacrament it is in English and when he does it it is in Bahasa. We pass out written copies of the sacrament prayer to the members in the two languages so they can follow along.
What a blessing for the branch to have a missionary going out to serve. How is your Bahasa coming? We never learned to speak or understand it very well but we did could read the Book of Mormon and most newspapers. Thanks for serving and sharing.
ReplyDeleteWe have not even tried to learn Bahasa. We tried the first part of our mission to learn the native language Tetun but we never got the hang of it. It was challenging because most of the people we dealt with would speak English to us. About our only native vocabulary is speaking to the taxi drivers.
ReplyDeleteit has been a wonderful experience being in this little group. We're not even classified as a branch or technically not even a group. We're just some saints meeting under the authorization of the mission president. The Saints here all alone without much support and very little church organization. Yet they do wonderful.
love reading your blog!!!
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