8/29/09

hey pretty lady you worry to much. it just so happens that last week i didnt have time to email anyway so i wouldnt have read them if you did email me. ;-) but i do appreciate you writing me all the time i know your always busy but its always good to hear from my mommy. man i have been out here for a long time now. this world seems more at home to me than the one you guys are in and yes they are two different worlds. i had an amazing week last week i had a baptism a 12 year old boy named valoa tonga. he is a good kid from a little island he came down here to go to school and so he is living with a family here in our area. i totally didnt know that shanna was getting married but good for her. i found out that rhino hyatt has had a girl for a couple months now. i was really sorry to hear about your bad day mom. some of those days you just wish you had never woke up in the morning. luckily i have never had one of those though so i can only sympathise with you so much. ;-) life is just peachy here im loving it and everything is going great. there is a general authority here right now with his family visiting our mission and we are in charge of everything he and the president do we plan cars planes boats meals. we move missionaries to meeting s feed them and get them home. plus we go to all the meetings to listen to all the awesome talks. needles to say that we have been busy we have pulled a few 20 hour days this week. this is week five of the transfer and it looks like i will be staying another transfer with my same comp here in the office. sorry i accidently sent that one before i finished it so read teh other one first then this one. but today was our pday and we had a blast my comp and i rode our bikes for an hour out to the very end of the island through all my first areas all the way to the end. (by the way if your looking at a map of tonga i live in liahona right now) so my comp and i spent a few hours out there catching fish and eating them it was a really fun. then we get a phone call( we are required to have our phone on us at all times) telling us that although president and elder hamula are in vavau there families are here in tonga and getting kind of restless so they ask us to entertain them. we took them and all the couple missionaries (4couples) out to some cliffs and caves and (2 15yr old buys 1 17yr girl) we caugh tsome fish for them and showed them how to eat it raw the boys were all up for it but the girl was apparently not very hungry. then we caught some crabs and cooked them up for them. i even climbed a coconut tree for them to try that. then we took them whale watching. by then it was time for my comp an di to get back to work so we did some teachings tonight then i thought i would drop you guys a line saying hi and that i love you all. sorry my spelling is so bad im trying to write this in a hurry because i always forget the stuff im supposed to write you guys about. i think i have already forgotten all the cool stuff but its ok i still write in my journal most of the time so you can ask me about it later. (even all the spiritual stuff that i never seem to write you guys about gets in there so you can all be spiritually edified when you read my journal. or you could read a journal i read about it the other day its by this guy named nephi turns out he was a pretty cool guy he actually saw the savior and so did his little brother so i would recommend reading his first but if you have some spare time after that ill be happy to share my journal with you all im trying to keep it so that you all and even my grand kids can read it. but anyway i love you all elder mayberry

8/14/09

well mother that was a very enjoyable letter and got some good news
out of it. i have some great news i got both your box and grams box
this week and i was very happy to get both of them. they made me a
very happy little elder. please tell gram thank you for me. and tell
you thank your for me as well. i dont know why you didnt get a picture
of me and the pres every one else in my group did maybe they just
forgot. but i will get one sometime in the near future. did i ever
get a plaque made?
tell steven i said hi.
tell thomas good luck on the Chem class and that if all else fails just make
it blow up then when you fail the class at least it will be
entertaining. and if you make it blow up big enough you might realize
that chemistry is kind of fun.

this week was really good we are teaching a lot nowadays we hit 4
lessons last night and we have some families that are really coming
along well. i would go into detail on all of the wonderful experiences
that happen here.......... but that's what the ensign is for. ;-) and
who am i to try to compete with the prophet.
well i think that i m going with my comp down to the beach we are
going to go get some coconuts and a family is cooking us dinner then
we are going down to the beach with a bunch of teenagers and having a
picnic i have no idea how to spell that. i love you all
the church is true. the best way to gain a testimony of it is to live
it and see how wonderful it makes your life.
elder mayberry

8/11/09

first of all i just want to point out the word terrific used to mean
full of terror so be careful how you use that one. ;-) i think maybe
morgan is practicing to be a business man. its good to hear that you
are all doing well though. so who is amp guy girl where from???? how
on earth did you get dad to agree to that one? youll have to let me
know what that ends up being like



i have some sad news thursday at 1 in the morning a boat sunk here in
tonga on its way out to some of the outer islands there are a lot of
people dead and missing. there were a few families that had come down
to be sealed in the temple and then drowned in the boat not three days
later. we lost a few people that my comp and i had been teaching. they
were going back to their home in ha'apai and the missionaries in
haapai were supposed to pick up where we left off but they never made
it back. luckily there were no missionaries on the boat that would
have been really hard because my comp and i are the ones who do all
travel arrangements so we lucked out on that one. we had some
missionaries on that boat not two days before it sank. i think
heavenly father was looking out for them.
the boat i rode back from niua got retired and so they brought in a used
boat from fiji while they waited for a new boat to be donated by the
japanese./ but the boat they got had some really bad leaks and they
used it any way. when the bottom is filled up with water the boat
sways side to side really bad and i guess one time it just flipped all
the way over upside down and all the people inside died. the people on
the top deck got out but that was mostly the men. they let the women
stay inside where it is more comfy. anyway it was really sad.
/love mayberry
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Creature comforts

hey mom and family i have been moved here to the main island and i am loving it. i have been averaging 4 hours of sleep a night. we are in charge of all the transfers and moving people around to all the islands and so we have been very busy. we are also in charge of all the paper work that gets submitted to salt lake so we do all the baptism records into the computer. and we have a bunch of other jobs so we work hard and the days go by very fast. my p-day is Saturday so that we are available to help the other missionaries on their pdays. my comp is elder hanberg a palangi from utah he kind of reminds me of jeff mcfarland. they have the same attitude to things and so we are doing awesome working hard and sleeping harder. i have to tell you for as much as you are all becoming redneck i just got back into civilization. i got my first shower with running water in 6 months my first hot shower since the mtc. i put on shoes for the first time since nov 18 i used a microwave for the first time since i left home. my poor mind is about to go into shock. as for the missionary side of things we are always really busy but we try to fit in a teaching a day. it has been really good we have a small pool of investigators. i get to see the president every day i had to do some maintenance on his computer the other day because he locked himself out so he was impressed with my hacking skills. there is a good chance that i will get fat here in the office we eat really well and ride around in a van all day running errands and sit around doing paper work. but hey it happens right. ;-) we actually exercise every day i climbed some coconut trees this morning peeled the husk off and then put them in my refrigerator (another first) i kinda left my island experiences behind but tonga still gets some of them and with all the work we get to do im a very happy boy. i was sad to hear about david i hope it all works out for him. tell him to just stop being a faker. oh hey i met a doctor who is down here for a little while turns out he is a goodman from tucson but his parents are from st david. i dont remember what side of the family he came from but it was pretty funny i was talking to a few tongans and he saw my name tag and said something to the effect that he knew some mayberrys from st david. it was pretty cool then i played interpreter for a little while. well i got to go but i love you all and im sorry my typing stinks im kinda in a hurry. well love you all elder mayberry