I don't think we have a district. It must be just Tristan and I. We do have a zone leader, one of the senior couples who have been out the longest. There are five senior couples serving on five different islands. We do a Webinar once a month. It doesn't always work very great. Sometimes we are able to share some things and other times it doesn't work at all. We did meet together in January for one and a half days training.
The people speak English and Spanish. Their English is hard to understand, however. Sometimes we come home so tired from straining to understand what they are saying! There are a lot of people on our island from other islands in the Caribbean. They each have their own dialect. Some we can understand better than others. There are also a lot who speak Spanish. I minored in Spanish, but haven't used it since college so it has been really hard. I wish they would have given me some language training before we came! But we are teaching a Spanish-speaking sister and her husband. He speaks English but she does not. So I am using a lot of Spanish right now. It helps to have the PMG pamphlets in Spanish so I can practice before we meet with them.
We do lots of teaching and all of the finding. We wish the branch members would help out more that way. They have a "live and let live" attitude here and don't even want us to bother their adult kids. So it is hard to find people. We don't knock doors. Our mission president set a goal for us to have eight baptisms this year on each island. We are on track for one, so we have to get a lot more faith than we have.
Some days we are really busy and some days people cancel appointments and then we have NOTHING to do. They don't really like us to drop in without appointments so it is hard. Those kind of days are really hard because I feel guilty and feel like we aren't very good missionaries. That part I won't miss when we go home. It is a lot of pressure to be finding and teaching all the time. I admire the young missionaries that they are so good at that. But I am old and it is hard.
Our apartment is nice for St. Croix standards. Most importantly, we feel safe here. But in reality it is much like a college apartment, cracked tile floors and all! There are screens on the windows, but no glass except for the sliding glass door. It has a nice deck, but we never spend any time there. It does have a decrepit washer and dryer for which we are most grateful. Most people here have to use the laundromat. AND, there is a swimming pool in the complex which occasionally we use on P-days!
There is no water on the island so all the water they use is either collected rain water or water from a desalination plant. Water is very costly so we use it sparingly. Most people do not drink the desalinated water, they buy gallon jugs of water at the store. Our apartment has a filter so we feel safe to shower, etc. and the church provides a triple filtering system for us so we can drink the water in our apartment instead of buying it at the grocery store.
We have small air conditioners in the bedroom and the living room. We only use them in one room at a time and shut all the doors in that room when we use it. Power is also very costly.
There are lots of grocery stores, but food is very expensive. I bought a can of cream of celery soup to make Tristan's favorite chicken chow mein and it cost $3.89 for one can! Later, I found it in another store for less. But I feel bad for people here who don't have much money and then have to spend so much on groceries. There is no fresh fruit or produce here. Everything is shipped in so it is in bad shape or wilted by the time it gets here. There are plenty of coconuts, however!
We feel so fortunate to be on a US Virgin island. Three of the other couples are on islands that are not and they have a harder time than us. At least our kids can mail us things we need as the postage is the same here as in the states and it doesn't have a customs fee. K-Mart is here so that is where we shop a lot. We had to do some fixing up in the apartment when we first got here as pretty much everything was rusted out. It is an expensive mission in lots of ways besides the monthly fees to the church!
We drive a 2011 Toyota Rav that squeaks and groans from all the potholes here. The roads are horrible beyond your imagination! We are just so glad for the Rav as it sits a little higher off the ground than a car and handles the rough roads better!
We are happy and blessed to be here. There is a big African influence here which is very interesting and fun. I think we are mostly over the, "EEEWH" parts of the mission so we aren't bothered by much anymore. We feel grateful for all we have because there are a lot worse mission experiences than ours for sure!
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