Dear Family

Mauri mauri, its great hearing from you. I'm glad everyone seems to be doing well there and I hope it stays that way. I'm doing really well the week started out kind of crazy. There was an Elder here from Tonga who went home on Thursday. A bunch of people had big farewell dinners for him and invited all of the missionaries. I don't really enjoy them because a lot of the time they make everyone get up and talk, which I don't ever really like but its even harder when I don't really know the person and these kind of things always go really late. At one we had to play a game where the loser had to go in the middle and dance I almost had to do it but the other guy kind of cheated so they made him go instead. That's another reason I don't really enjoy them because there's usually something like that, But they were okay it was really cool to see how much the people here loved that Elder and how much he loved them.
We went to the airport Thursday morning to say goodbye to Elder Noa . On the same plane that he left on there where five new elders from America. One of them is the kid who worked at Jake's bank I haven't really had a chance to talk to him but it was cool talking to him at the airport for a little while. It's really weird to think I'm not one of the new guys anymore. On Saturday transfers happened Elder Green got moved to a new area and Elder Cole is training one of new Elders. His name is Elder Staley ,he's from Alaska. I'm sure he'll do great, but this morning he started getting sick and having to use the restroom a lot, if you get what I mean, it made me really grateful that I haven't had to many problems physically. I'm still with Elder Rameka which I'm really happy about, he's awesome.

One thing that has made this week really good is that I'm finally starting remember a little bit of this language, still not much but some things. I think a big thing has been my attitude, I worked really hard to not let myself get discouraged and make myself talk and it been a lot better. One thing I found that kinda helped was a quote by Mark Twain. We were in the zone leaders van and this book of quotes for missionary's was there. I started glancing through it and I found this " Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain." I've really tried to follow that advice and have found that its true.

Something that Elder Rameka and I did this week that was kind of fun was that the Primary President asked us to help the primary learn the actions for a song they where singing at a stake activity. Elder Rameka had taught some girls who where deaf and so they thought he must be good at sign language. He knows a bit but thankfully he knew that some of the sister missionary's knew the actions so they showed us. We met with the primary over a couple of days to teach them, it was fun to get to know some of the kids. On Sunday they had the primary program. It was cool, one of the songs they sang was the one we showed them. It was pretty funny to watch, they forgot a lot of the actions but they really did a great job. So, its been good. We have some great people we are teaching who are really ready to be baptised, it's been so cool watching people grow in their faith, it's the coolest feeling. Well to close tell everyone that I love them, thanks for all your prayers I know they help. Until next week ti a bo.

Love, Elder Norton