Io̧kwe io̧kwe!

September 9, 2019

(Hello hello!)

Well, I'm in Evansville, Indiana now. It's my first time being in Indiana and it's just busy busy busy! The Marshallese craze is real! It's weird going my whole mission not having an hour for language study, but now I do. It's a pretty interesting language. "Io̧kwe" means "love" but it's used to say hello, also! It's pronounced kind of like "yogway" so it's pretty interesting. So if I said, "Io̧kwe! Ij io̧kwe eok!" that would mean, "Hello, I love you!" We had some sweet lessons this week with the m̧ajōls (people from the Marshall Islands) and we had 18 of them come to church! We are working towards starting a group here because many of them are members that were baptized on the Marshall islands but never had their records moved or just didn't take very good records. But there are a lot that aren't baptized yet and it's really awesome to work with them.

On Saturday we drove around for about 5 hours with an endowed Marshallese member named Brother Bilimon and talked to a bunch of them and gave away a bunch of copies of the Book of Mormon to them, most of which are related to him. There was one person that we visited that had some pretty cool decorations, and I asked him where he got them... so he just said you can take it. They're such a relaxed bunch of people and it's awesome to be able to work with them! That's most of the work that we've done this past week, but we did talk to a couple of English speakers too. One of them, Paul, whom we are working with, is pretty cool and kinda weird. But we love him! He's got lots of stories but he hasn't missed church in 14 weeks!

So this is my seventh area. It's really weird because no two areas are alike. Everywhere I have gone has been completely different, but the gospel always stays the same. At a dinner appointment with the Hogues last night we were talking about how many of the different policies in the church change, but the doctrine and the love that God has for His children will always remain constant. Even if we don't understand why everything is happening the way that it is, we must trust and have faith in God that there is a reason for it, and that all things will be for our good. That's all for this week. We didn't take too many pictures this week though. It's been a crazy week. Anyways! Ij Io̧kwe kom! Bar lo kom!

Love, Elder Ray
8164 Lincoln Avenue apartment B Evansville, IN 47715

The decoration the m̧ajōl gave me.

Elder Norwood and I