Tuesday, May 14, 2024

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

• Sister's apartment bug sprayed
• Darren Barbe found his parents
• Visited Jean Williams and gave her a blessing
• My first real dog attack and it could have been very ugly
• My thoughts on trials
• Cargo Ships

What a day, where do I start. After all our morning routine, exercise, scripture study, planning and breakfast and morning prayers we left to go over to the sisters apartment. The pest control company was supposed to be there this morning at 9:30. He showed up around 10. He did an inspection of what he was going to spray and then sprayed. He was also supposed to spray the upstairs apartment above the Sisters so their bugs didn't come down after the spray wore off. Anyway he seemed to know what he was doing. Once he was done he said he would come back the next two weeks and spray again. That should help, There house was really infested with bugs. Mostly cockroaches which nobody likes. 

We had to go down town to take care of paperwork for the new missionaries that came in last week. We have to get the paper notarized by the Justus of the peace. He sits on a corner all day every day.

Tina getting paperwork notarized by the Justus of the peach

Once we were done with that, and we missed District Leaders meeting, we headed to the hospital to see Darren Barbe. We finally got some good news. First his parents contacted him and came and seen him. I guess they have not spoke to each other for 30 years. We spoke with his social worker and she thinks he will be able to go home to his parents home to recover. I have pledged $600 EC dollars a month to help pay some of the expenses. The government will pay the rest. It seem to be an answer to prayers for some way he would be taken care of. He couldn't go home, he lives in a small container box with no power, water or anything else. It seems like it would be hotter than heck in there. I'm hoping we can help him help himself. He is very skinny, I mean really skinny. Like me touching my thumb to the finger next to it and make a circle and that would be his arms. At any rate he was really upbeat about this and it looks like and answer to prayers if it works out. 

After we went left the hospital we went and visited Geneva Williams, She goes by Jean. We got to her house and visited with a couple of ladies at a small shop close to Jeans home. It was 1:00 pm and they were closing shop to go home and take a nap for a while and they would be back at 5 pm to reopen. They were very friendly and we enjoyed the visit. 

The little shop next to Sister Williams home. They are everywhere

At Jean's we knocked on her door and she came and said she had a bad toothache. Not much we could do for that, I did offer a blessing which she accepted. I blessed her that the pain would subside along with other things. She seemed appreciative. Tina shared a thought from the Book of Mormon from Mosiah 18:10 and we talked about her baptism which happened in 2013 it think. We asked her how she got contacted by the church and she said that she was standing someplace one day and the missionaries we teaching someone by her and so she joined them. She believe what they were teaching and she got baptized. She was in the hospital last year for 3 months for something. I guess she is all recovered now.

After leaving Jeans home we started towards home, but there is a returned missionary sister that has slipped into activity. We wanted to go visit her. I tried calling but she did not answer. Anyway we were going home and I looked on the branch directory and it actually had a pin right on a house that we thought might be hers. We used Google maps to get to it. The house was down a hill a bit that we had to walk down to get to the house.

This is where everything fell apart. There was a dog on the porch and he looked friendly enough, so I walked down this hill towards him, but as I got down there I seen another dog off to the left by a dog house that was tied up. He made me a little nervous. He looked like a Pitbull. Everything was fine until I went pass him and I could not get back to the hill that Tina was still standing on, and he attacked. Turns out the rope he was tied to was very long and I couldn't get away. He bit my leg and I kicked him off and then he went for my arm and bit it. I knocked him off and he bit my leg again. I kicked him off again and he finally gave up. I think that might have been divine intervention, because he had me trapped. He backed off and I ran and got out of the range of his rope. My arm didn't look to bad, but I told Tina that I think he got my leg pretty good, so we headed for the truck. In the process I lost my glasses that were in my pocket. We weren't going back. We headed home and I spend about an hour rinsing my cuts and as I suspected, my leg is pretty chewed up. We had to go to the store and buy some bandage raps and we have bandaged everything up. The cuts on my arm didn't look to bad, but he bit hard and made puncture wounds. They keep wanting to bleed. We debated to go to the doctor and decided that maybe we should, but when we decided to go the walk-in clinic was closed and after go in the hospital here, I am not going there, I hope. 

We have been dealing with treating the cuts all evening. We will look at them in the morning and if they look bad we will go to the clinic for treatment. Tina to try and encourage me started telling me of all the missionaries that have suffered. Abinadi, Ammon's brothers, Alma and Amulek and so forth and that I was in good company. I'm sure at some point we will laugh about this, but right now, it has been hard. I think there for a while I was lower than a snakes belly, but I have picked up a little now. 

It is funny, not really, but in the sense that this morning I was reading the Sunday School lesson and it was about Abinadi and he is about to be burned at the stake. That was definitely worse than my dog bite. And I read a talk from this past conference. It was Elder Shayne M. Bowen of the Seventy. He spoke on how some prayer are heard and answered in they way we want them to and some are not, but we must trust in Gods judgment. 

One of my frustrations was did the spirit tell me to go back and I didn't listen. I'm sure when I finally seen the dog I thought about it. I prayed for protection this morning before we left, so in my mind I didn't listing to a prompting, I know he would not want me to be chewed up by a dog. And I don't know if it is over yet, what if it get's infected or something, Some of the bites are pretty deep. I can only keep going forward in faith and learn from it. One thing I have learned is to not trust any dog. Almost everyone has dogs to protect or warn them if someone comes in their yards. Maybe there could be a worse situation that I could be in in the future that I would miss if I didn't have this experience. I just feel that I really did miss a warning. I so much want to become more in turn with the spirit.

I do have to say, that there was some devine intervention though, After he bit me the third time and had me backed into a corner and I had no escape he just quite and went back to his dog house. A second before that he was going to tear me to pieces. 

My mission has had a rocky start and has challenged me to the very core. I trust in God's training and purposes to make me the type of person he want me to become. I hope I get there some day before to many more setback. I love him with all my heart because there have been far to many other experiences where I have seen his hand in my life in good ways, so sometimes we have to take the bad with the good.

Everything on the island comes in on cargo ships. We really are grateful for them. A while back every store was out of sugar for two weeks waiting for a cargo ship to come in.