RABI LIFE

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Well hey guys so just like every other week there is just way to much that happens to write it all but I will try my best to put some good highlights in this email!

So I will just tell some good stories that have happened recently. First just to get you guys a picture of things that happen on our usual days, last week on our p-day, we were on a run to go lift some weights at a members house that have them. Its like 3 miles of hills so its a pretty hard run, and about half way through the run we hear barking which is never a good sign, and we see a dog just hauling as fast as it can at us from probably like thirty yards away. We knew it was going to attack us so there was only one thing we could do. TURN ON THE JETS. We were just sprinting as fast as we could trying to outrun it, and right when it was about to catch me a guy we knew came from around the corner with a stick and hit the dog. Literally that guy was an angel. Haha but as for dogs, we get attacked and chased all the time, but luckily I haven't been bit yet!!! But ya dogs suck. I'm definitely never having one in my house. So that's a fun thing we deal with but hey at least I'm getting faster with the sprints I'm doing to get away from the dogs! hahaha #brightside
 

The next story I have is of a less active lady who we are working with who is my favorite lady ever. But she wouldn't take the sacrament because she didn't think her records were in our branch yet. So we worked forever to get a list of all the members of our ward so we could show her her records so she would take the sacrament. We got the list and finally when we showed her she just broke down in tears of joy saying how she felt how much God loves her now. She said that she has told past Elders her problem but they have never found her records, but because we put in the effort to find them, she felt as if it was God telling her she needed to be back at church taking the sacrament! Such an amazingly spiritual moment of being able to help someone come closer to their Lord and savior Jesus Christ! I love this Work!
 

Another fun story has been boils that have started popping up all over my ankle. So here in the Fiji Suva mision everyone gets a boil at some time or another, and this last week was my time, for 4 of them............ wow hahah they are just like these super huge pimples that blow up with puss and swell and hurt and ya it was interesting... haha but my whole foot swelled up to the size of like an elephant, it was so fat... haha but we are all good now!

 

As for right now we are heading to Suva for the temple rededication where we will be able to meet President Eyring in person! We are so excited! I know without a doubt that temples are the Lord's house and with them we can be together with our families forever!:)

Anyways guys I love you all so much! I love this work and I know what I'm doing is right. This is Heavenly Father's work and he leads and directs it every single day! Thanks for all the love and prayers you send me. Have a great week everyone!

Elder Mumford

Showing an old lady how to do peach signs.  Haha

 

Dinner appointment

 

Kids playing in a tree

 

Playing ping pong for FHE

 

 

 

Another week in Rabi

Some of the wildlife of Rabi... hahaha so this is one of the mice that we killed by hitting it a million times with the broom. There are heaps of mice in our flat and since our flat is so small they sometimes have ran over our feet while we are sitting at our desks or touched us.... #fun haha Some other things we deal with on Rabi is we have had barely any water lately so we don't flush our toilet for days at a time which smells fantastic. lol And we usually hang our clothes on bushes to dry after we wash them in our buckets hahaha swag.

 

 

And this is a picture of a horse that kept following me and tried to kick me so I took a selfie with it.... only in Rabi. lol

 

         A way nice sunset!

Me and Elder Alonzo with flowers in our hair and our cute recent convert! ;)

 

 

 

And this is the class at the high school. I don't know if I have told you about it yet! Anyways so every Friday morning we have an hour to do a religion class at the high school where kids can choose what religion to go to and learn a bit of our basic beliefs. So ya we teach our basic beliefs in Gilbertese to a class of thirty high school kids. They laugh at us the whole time but it's so fun! It's cool because there are only 4 or so members in the class but like 30 people there, mostly girls.  Elder Alonzo always jokes it's because they are coming to see the boy with white skin.... probably true;) hahaha

 

 

    A cute little boy in Rabi.

So this is how we were catching water one day. Off of a broken rain gutter into a bucket #swag #inventive hahaha

Life in Rabi

 

So I'm going to do my email a bit differently this week and just tell stories through my pictures! So here is a picture of walking the huge mountains of Rabi. So back story to this is that we were going to do service at a less actives house and missed a carrier but we knew how important it was to do service for them so we just took our bags and hiked two hours over giant mountains on the most humid day ever! Man it was so hard. But it all payed off because they came to church this week! Such a testimony builder on serving people and how loving people is the way you help them! This is like how most of the work is right now. Its so hard but its really paying off. The language is hard but at this point I feel pretty comfortable. Its amazing that it takes people years to learn a language and I feel pretty comfortable in 3 months...... how crazy is that? I will never be able to deny the gift of tongues and how much it helps me everyday! The day to day work here in Rabi is pretty challenging.  We walk miles every single day, but once again we feel it paying off! My first week here we had 4 lessons in this area and this last week we had 18 and every single person we are teaching me and Alonzo found whether they are less active or an investigator.  We are really working hard to build up the area! Its tough but our hard work is paying off and we are being blessed. I love it!!!

 

 

So this is my district leader, Elder Davis, who just got transferred. Since it was his last week in the area and there are alot of way awesome resorts that we have to drive past we went tourist mode for like an hour and took amazing pictures so I will make sure to send them all to you guys! Don't get too jealous!!!!;) ahha life is tough out here..... hahahah oh and these are all around Savusavu! so cool!

Me on a way sick swing and me and a hamburger. Both pictures in my opinion are equally as great but the hamburger is probably the better view... hahaha

The first picture just shows how blue the water is and the second one is a beach in Rabi.

This is the angel that everyone knows just walking through the gates of heaven. Haha  :)

This is just the average group of kids that we walk up to and joke around with in Gilbertese when we are bored sometimes. It's so funny because when they see the white person walking up to them they run up and try to speak to me in super broke English. They usually just know "hello" and then I say something in Gilbertese and hold a conversation with them and they are just floored. The look is priceless every time haha I love it!

 

 

This is our zone leaders who came out and did exchanges with us last week which was nice because we don't get to do exchanges very often! But their eyes were widened at how hard the work is out there so it was good to get on a better understanding with them. It was funny because they brought a bag of food with them and they said they were worried for us at how excited we were because of the food. haha Way funny. Then these are another picture of my last baptism we had on rabi!

 

This is another picture of my last baptism we had on Rabi!

This is some of the jungle like terrain that we walk through when we are visiting people that live farther away from the villages. Isnt it way sick that we are just walking through this all?! haha I love the bush! :) #bushboy

HEY MY HOMIES

First of all Happy birthday dad and Brittany! Sorry I couldn't email you guys but I wrote happy birthday to you guys in my journal, that has to count right? hahaha Wow sorry its been so long since I've been able to email. I know it's hard not being able to hear from each other week in and week out, but just take comfort in knowing that the work is going so well out here. I love it all so much. It's been easily the hardest area out of my two areas but with that I'm pretty sure it will no doubt be my favorite of my whole mission. When you suffer for a people you just love them that much more, and I can feel that every single day!

So I'm just going to write this to you all because honestly I don't really have time for the whole group email thing anymore. Maybe once I get transfered to an area with more reliable internet each week I'll start it. But for now feel free to send this to anyone who wants to read it! Ok so I don't really know how to put 5 full weeks into an email so I will just put a few of the highlight things that happened.

So first New Years! So New Years day was my 6 month in the mission mark and Elder Alonzo's year in the mission mark plus New Years so you know we had to celebrate. So I burnt my tie which is tradition for 6 months and he burnt his white shirt for his one year and then we payed ten dollars to this member in our branch to make us the biggest fattest pie in the world. Wow it was like 3 feet of this fantastic custard pie and me and Elder Alonzo ate the whole thing! Happy New Years to us!:) haha And also if you didn't know it is tradition in Fiji for there to be just like a giant water fight on New Year. Like everyone just throws buckets of water on each other everywhere. So we were just studying in our flat when we went to answer a knock on the door and were splashed by two of the YSA (young single adult) guys in our ward with a super huge bucket of water. Soooo funny! We got them back later though! haha

New Year's Celebration

Tie Burning!

 Next crazy story that I have is that we went with the YSA here in Rabi for a hike to Korotabu, which means haunted or holy rock. So this place is a cave on the highest point/mountain of Rabi. Its about a 5 mile super steep yet beautiful hike each way to get all the way up there so this took us like all day. But this isn't any normal cave. So a long time before the Gilbertese people came to Rabi the Fijians lived here, and we all know how Fijians had a cannibal past. So when people from Tonga use to come to the island of Rabi, the tribal Fijians would hide in the mud and then use blow darts to take them down. And then they would take the Tongans back to the village and kill them and eat them and then they took all their bones up to this little cave at the top of the island! Crazy right? So sure enough this cave has tons of human bones. Arm bones, leg bones, one skull that's left over, its way cool. It was especially pretty cool after taking anatomy last year. It felt like I was back in Anatomy class with real bones! hahaa such a crazy place but it was so cool!

 

On top of Rabi!

Me and Elder Alonzo with bones!

 

Looking cute with a flower in my hair ;)

Another story I have that I was telling Cassie is of the new food that I ate a few weeks ago. Raw shark! haha So basically we went over to a members house for dinner and he was like oh so I was fishing today but instead I caught a four foot long shark. So here's shark instead of raw fish! hahaha What the heck? I'm telling you it's so hard to describe some of the things we see on a day to day basis. Kind of just surreal , but hey it was way good! It tasted like chicken and raw fish mixed, just super super chewy! haha Gotta love life on Rabi!

Fourth story before we talk about all the serious stuff is while proselyting last week Elder Alonzo accidentally pooped his pants...... hahaha he thought it was a fart but it ended up being a little more than that so he had to run into the forest to get things all figured out. Man I've never laughed so hard in my life! hahahahaha

Well as you all heard I had another baptism last week which was amazing. They are a 9 and 10 year old girl and boy from a part member family.(Their mom is the only member. The dad's a work and progress right now) but we slowly but surely reactivated the mom to full church service which was great and then taught the kids all the lessons and baptized them! Their names are Asiuta and Teta! We were so excited. We know that most of the people we have been teaching have just been kids but I truly do feel a change in these kids. We aren't just teaching them for numbers. They actually have a strong testimony of the gospel and its so cool! It's so fun with these kids that we have baptized because they are just like our little brothers and sisters now and I feel like they love us as much as we love them. Man I couldn't be more happy with the work so far here in Rabi! We are now also teaching an 18 and 21 year old girls who are the nieces of our branch president so that's pretty exciting as well! We were bummed because the 21 year old who just finished up university to be a teacher was leaving back to Suva for a teaching job, but out of a miracle she got a teaching job in Rabi instead so she is staying! It's so great because she is the less shy one out of the two so she really encourages the younger to keep taking the lessons so its been a blessing all the way around! We can just feel the Lord help move the work here along in Rabi, and we are so blessed to be apart of it.

 

Baptisms!

 

Crazy kids of Rabi! haha

Speaking of blessings from the work THE LANGUAGE. Last time I talked to you guys on Christmas I was honestly a little bit down with how hard the language has been here on Rabi. I just felt as if Gilbertese would never come! But after these last 5 weeks of working harder with Elder Alonzo on the language harder than I have ever worked on anything in my whole entire life, the gift of tongues is really hitting hard! Its truly amazing. I don't know how to even fully explain it. The full explanation will have to wait until some time in the future but wow we have been so blessed. Elder Alonzo has only been speaking the language for less than 4 months and I've been here for barely 2 months and we are smashing it in the language! Like we actually are feeling comfortable! Not even close to fluent and we learn so many new words a day but we are getting more and more comfortable! Like we don't even need to script any of our lessons anymore. We just go in with the spirit and teach whole lessons of the top of our head in Gilbertese. I really truly don't know how this has happened. Its more than a miracle but I'm so happy about it! Don't get me wrong its still so hard very single day. Harder than anything I've ever done. But the Lord truly does qualify those he calls. And since he has called me to teach the Gospel in Gilbertese, he helps me teach in Gilbertese! I love this gospel so much and I know that its all true. I know without a doubt this is Christ's church here on the earth led by a living prophet today! I love you all so much. I'm sorry communication is sucky lately but I think about and pray about you guys every single day! And I can feel all your prayers for me, so thank you! Love you all!

 

Me with a way cool YSA before he left on his mission to the Philipines

 

Love,

 

Elder Mumford

 

P.S.

There is this sign on Rabi that says "hope to see you again" so I did a little heal click right beside it. I thought it would just be gold to send it to you guys right when I left the email shop because I hope I can email again sooon hahaha #comedian

 

Look at those hops am I right?! #athletic