May 8th - Happy Mother's Day! We get to SKYPE!!!!

Note from mom and dad - We were able to Skype with Justin for about an hour and a half today which was awesome.  He is doing great and it was so wonderful to see his face and hear his voice.  As we spoke, we were able to hear a group singing in Samoan in the background during a holiday celebration.  It was also fun to hear his companion and Temple (son of the ward mission leader) making comments and laughing throughout.  We feel like this past 8 months has gone really quickly and he said it has flown so fast.  We hope the next 16 months go just as fast!

Uncooked skinned pig on the really hot rocks.

Umu done!

This week was good! We just did a pig in the umu with our ward mission leader. They shot the pig this morning. We watched them skin it, take all the insides out, and then cook it.  This was definitely far out of my comfort zone, but it is very cool to see these types of cultural traditions. It smells so good and it only took like 30 minutes to cook. They did it for the women of the ward and they're doing a party today for them. The Monday after Mother's Day is a holiday in Samoa so the celebration is going on right now!  Temple's dad also gave us a shout-out on the radio and said some nice things about us which was pretty cool.

Still working with the Mamoe family. Haven't set a baptismal date with them yet but it's gonna happen this week!

We had a really good first lesson with one of our investigators that we've been trying to contact for at least a month. We taught lesson one and she asked some good questions along the way. When it came time to tell the Joseph Smith story, the spirit totally took over. We shared the first vision and she understood it all and didn't have any questions. We invited her to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it. We invited her to be baptized on the 21st but we'll probably have to push it back because she isn't married yet. That's an extremely common thing here in Samoa. Hardly anyone is married.

Oh and I was reading the BoM in Samoan and the word for Gentiles in Samoan is Nu'uese which didn't really make sense to me because they didn't Samoanize Gentile. Then I read in the Bible Dictionary that Gentile means everyone else other than Jews. I didn't know that before but it makes total sense. Nu'uese in Samoan means different villages.