Letter from Elder Meyer: Cookies for sacrament, a huge dragon lizard, and is he wearing shoes any more?

Hello everyone!!

Wow, there are a lot of questions I have to answer. I will try to get them all. If I miss one, please ask it again. I love to answer them.

Dad - for Carol. In my branch there is a Relief Society. Umm, as for the primary and young men/women, not really. There are only 2 active young men and only 2 kids who come most of the time. They normally either join in with us or run around the building.

To find people, we park our car in the middle of a village and start walking. We go up to a "house" and say hello. They respond with hello. I ask how are you doing in Yapese. They will always say “good”. After that they will normally start talking to us in English.

They will normally listen to what we have to say. They don't really say too much to us. If we want them to be engaged, we have to ask a lot of questions. Some people will, however, keep talking about random things.

The kids here are so awesome. They always are fun to be with. They are great. They are very fun. Most of them only know Yapese or an outer island language. It is sometimes hard to talk to them.

My language is coming along good, I guess. Right now I am mostly memorizing words. The sentence structure is really confusing. It is hard, but I know I can do it with the Lords help. Let’s see, I can say a lot of random words. I can give a prayer in Yapese. I am working on my testimony right now. I guess I could write it all out for you, but how about I will use the voice recorder and send it home. I can definitely feel my Heavenly Father’s love. Even better, I can feel his love for the people here. My testimony has grown sooo much. I am glad that you like girl’s camp.

Mom - I have not gotten the package. I am very excited to get it though. Please do not spend $470 on the Yapese-English dictionary though. That would be crazy.

Restaurants. Well there are a couple of restaurants. I have eaten at one of them. I had a hamburger. It was pretty good. Not as good as yours. There are no tomatoes here so they used cucumbers. ha-ha. Um, the other restaurant is a float ship. I guess it is really expensive. I have to eat there. Nope, I have not tried anything else new yet. The mango season was over before I got here. The papaya, not sure how to spell that, season should start here pretty soon.

I have tried a little bit of fish. It was pretty darn good. It surprisingly didn't taste that fishy. Besides that, there is not really any other food here. Unless you count spam. Haha. I have had a lot of that.

As for the ATM card, nope, can't use that. You pull all of the cash out at the beginning of the month. I have not had any reason to pull cash out of my account yet. Mom, I am sure glad that girl’s camp was so great. That stinks that your car had problems. It sounds like the Lord was taking care of you though. I am glad the whole thing was a great experience.

Staheli - I am doing great. I am very excited about the package. I love to hear from you and how you are doing. I love you so much and miss you too. Do you have any questions you want answered?

Reed - I have not got a machete yet. I will get one at some point. Don't worry. If you really want, I will get you one too.

That is so cool that you got to go motorcycling with the Browns. I bet it was a ton of fun. I am glad that dad’s bike is fixed so you two can go together again. Have a good time at scout camp.

I just sent out some letters. Um, in the letter I said I sent it out on Monday but it was actually Thursday. I am curious how long it takes to get there.

I saw the biggest dragon lizard; I think is what they are called. It was huge. It was like 3.5 feet long. It is the only one that my companion has seen that is alive. The other one he saw was dead. IT was pretty cool.

They APs came and visited us this week. It was pretty good. On that day we picked up a couple of new investigators. It was great!!! We tried to go see them yesterday, but none of them were there. One investigator, Absalum, was going great. Then his grandma told us we could not talk to him anymore. I am sad about that. We saw him on the road. We stopped for a minute and talked with him. He said that he wants to still meet with us, but we can only do it randomly on the road, and not at his house. SO, we said that we would look for him when we are in the village. I wish we could teach him.

This Friday and Saturday there was a District (stake) youth camp. We were asked to help out a little bit. It is basically a youth conference type of a thing. It was great. There were about 16ish youth there. It was a lot of fun. I loved being able to help out with that and get to know more youth better.

Church yesterday was pretty funny. We had no bread for the sacrament. So we used cookies. It was kind of fun. I blessed it. When I got to where you say "bread" I kind of stumbled and thought, “they are cookies, do I say cookies?” I didn't, it just kind of made me laugh.

Besides that, not too much happened. To be honest, this week went by really really fast.

Do you think I should send home memory cards with pictures? I don't know if I can trust the mail enough. I will send home the voice recorder next week. I forgot it in Thool. If you think I should try, I will. Let me know what I should do. I love you all so so much. Miss you too. You are the best family ever. You give me much strength.

Love you tons !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Elder Johnny Meyer