Hike last P Day to the "foschoda?" I don't know how to spell it. A waterfall

"pomme d'étoile" aka star fruit. you scoop it out with a spoon

S'mores!

Hello family!

Aaron made a hilarious comment, that today is probably the only time I will ever be excited for my birthday to be on a Monday. Because it is P Day! Woot woot! I can't believe it has been one year this weekend since I arrived on Ahe. This weekend has already been infinitely better, because I was able to watch all the sessions of conference in English! It was broadcast at our stake center in French, but they set up two little TVs in different rooms for Tahitian and English. So I am feeling blessed. And I can't believe I am 20 years old. I feel old. But to put things in perspective: Mom and Dad, you now have three kids in their 20's. So I guess you two are the old ones ;) Hahaha.

To start off the week, 12 of our 14 fixed lessons were cancelled, or the investigator wasn't at their house, etc. I started going to lessons expecting no one to be there. Anyways, what resulted was that by Friday we had taught 5 lessons all week, and we had already visited everyone we knew in the whole sector. We tried a little bit of door to door contacting, and found one new ami from it. But overall, it is extremely ineffective here in our sector. Everyone has big metal gates and they hide from us when we call. Oh, to be in America where you ring doorbells and people come to the door! #missionarywoes
We ended the week with 9 lessons.  But we had the baptism for D, one of our investigators. I was entering his info on our report for the zone last night, and I realized that he is younger than me! He's 19, and I am now... 20. Weird.
What else was cancelled... oh, a meeting with all the missionaries in the zone and the stake president and our stake high councilman. The missionaries came, but the stake leaders didn't show up. But I was hardly surprised after our week. That's how things were this week!

Some positive things that happened: we taught D, an 18 year old french boy we're teaching, how to make S'mores! Super fun! We roasted s'mores at his house Tuesday night. He lives with his backyard on the beach and a view of Moorea. It's one of those locations where you think "is this even real?" Million dollar views exist haha. Anyways, we didn't have hershey chocolate, so we had to use some cadbury milk chocolate instead. I recommend it to everyone, it really makes the s'more taste a lot better! And there's no graham crackers here. So we used a biscuit/sweet cracker thing. The brand is "Arnott" and the cracker was the "milk arrowroot." They're from New Zealand. But all in all, the s'mores were like a million times better than any s'mores I'd eaten before, and we convinced D and C, (our new convert who came with us) that the USA knows whats up. Haha.
Conference was also great. I really enjoyed President Eyring's talk in the Priesthood session. I liked all the talks, I'll have to review my notes. Can't wait for the Liahona magazine next month!

Last night our zone had a little family night to say goodbye to some temporary missionaries who were waiting on their Visas. They're leaving this week. It was fun, we played some games and had a lesson and then ate cake after. Our zone is cool. I'll send some pictures of everything.

Anyways, I'm super happy it's a new week. Today we're going to try and go hiking again (it was great last week!), and tonight we have a family night. This Thursday we have our mission leadership conference at President's house, so it should be a good week! Keep me in your prayers!

Love,

Elder Barlow