May 25, 2014

Hey everyone!
This week was amazing! Saturday was full of miracles, pretty much the whole day was a miracle.
We got invited to a wedding in this village called Namuaimada and it was the first time we've been to this village because we didn't have any work out there. But when we got there, my companion told me that the last elders that were here in 2011 were ran out of this village! Crazy! But when we were there, we got to meet a lot of people and even had an intro lesson with a man named Weis.
Another man had a lot of questions, but we were unable to sit down with him because we needed to go back to the flat and do our studies. So we just gave him a restoration pamphlet. I think we will be going back there in a couple of weeks. Probable take it slow with that village. But while we were waiting for the bus back to town, we had this woman come up to us and ask us if we were LDS and we said yeah, we are the missionaries and she was talking about another woman in the
village that was wondering where the church was. We were able to meet the one who was looking for the church and she told us she is currently living in American Samoa for work, but she was just baptized at the end of April!! Crazy! When we were talking to her, a bus came, but we still needed to talk to her and the bus wasn't going to wait, so we decided to stay and talk to her and the bus left. When we finished talking to her, we saw 2 men that were at the wedding that we talked with a little and they offered us a ride back to town(about 30 minutes away). When we got to town, we stopped at the market to buy some bananas so we can have pancakes with them and we paid $1.50 for like 50 or 60 bananas, we thought it was too much so we gave some away to some people that we know, and we still had like 20 or 30. When we were walking back to the flat we got another ride from this Fijian man that we always see when we walk to the bridge that is out. He gave us a ride in a really big truck that is used for carrying rocks and dirt and stuff. That was really nice, then we tried to give him some
bananas, but he wouldn't take them! He told us that picking us up and dropping us off was a blessing. Hopefully one day we will get to sit down with him. We are just way busy! But thank you for the email and everything! I got the package about 2 weeks ago, but my district leader still has it.
I'll pick it up tomorrow. Thank you for everything!
Oh and we had a baptism in the ocean yesterday!! Yawa(far out) hahaha
Love you guys!
Love, Elder Beilman

May 18, 2014

Hey everyone!
Thanks for the email and the pictures. Unfortunately, I haven't heard from my mom in a while.
She hasn't e-mailed me back for about a month or so. Don't know why. So I only got to skype my dad. That was really good though. I'm really happy I got to do that. I think it really helped him too.

But everything here is going well.  My companion and I didn't get to proselyte much this week. Lots of things happened. Monday and Tuesday we were in Ba which is like 2 hours away from our area. But we were there so we could skype.  On Wednesday I was sick as well as Thursday.
Just a sore throat and a bad cough. I still have the cough, but its slowly going away.
On Friday, we got to proselyte for about 5 hours and that was good. We went to visit our Second counselor's, President Besetimoala, son Xavier. He is awesome, he is really thinking about going on a mission. Hopefully he does, that would really help his family. They are all less active. We had dinner with them and shared a little bit of the gospel. It was really good. Then on Saturday, it rained all day.
And it rained a lot. Town started to flood and we had to go back to the flat. We couldn't proselyte anywhere because everywhere we would/could go was getting flooded. And we didn't want to put
ourselves in any danger. Then on Sunday we had church cancelled because of the flood/weather, but we went to visit one of our investigators, Shayal who was supposed to be baptized yesterday, and
town wasn't flooded anymore and all the water was gone. So I'm not completely sure why it was cancelled. We could have had church in my opinion. But it's not up to me. The worst part is that Xavier walked an hour to church yesterday to come and we had to tell him it was cancelled. Hopefully he comes next week though. Thanks again for the e-mail! Hope all is well!
Love you guys!
Elder Beilman

May 12, 2014

Hey everyone,

Snow in May?! That's kind of crazy... but there wasn't much snow during winter anyway, so maybe it will help. Sounds like you are still pretty busy. Yeah, I got the email with the PIN number, thanks. I still haven't got the package from Easter. It's probably in Suva right now. The Zone leaders are probably going to pick it up soon and I'll get it at the end of May. That's the only bad thing about living away from Suva. But oh well. As long as I get it.

We had a really good week this week. The whole mission set a goal for 220 baptisms this quarter (April, May, June.) We get our new mission president in July, so it's supposed to be a little going away present for President Klingler and a Welcoming present for President Layton.
So we set a goal as a mission to get 6 new investigators last week and invite them to baptism after the 2nd teaching appointment. We got 7 new investigators! It was so cool. We had service on Wednesday last week and we were finished early so we were looking for another man's house that said we could help him anytime we need service, but we wer looking for about 45 minutes then we walked by this house that had this young woman and a little girl that said "Bula" as we walked by, and I was prompted to go over there and OYM them. But at first we just walked by, but all I could think about is talking to them. So we went back and set up another appointment. When we came back, the young
woman, Vani, seemed really excited to see us come back. We are going to see them on Wednesday. Way excited. Grateful to be here.
Anyway, I don't have much time.
Love you all,
Elder Beilman

This is what I had for dinner the other night. It's called Duruka. 

It was pretty good. Looks way gross though, haha.

May 4, 2014

Hey everyone!

Sorry, I don't have much time again.
But that's funny that Jane's clogging thing at Lagoon and Curt's State tennis is the same time again. That was a lot of fun last year! I can't believe that was almost a year ago already. Time is flying by. But that's good that Curt is doing really good again in tennis and got to go repelling. 5:40 Mile-Alli! Whoa, I think that is faster than any of my times, that's way good.  Nice photo bomb, Jane, haha. I miss you guys haha.
We are super busy. Everyday. I can't believe that I'm tired before 10 pm every single night. We walk so far. The other day, it was around 7-8 miles.  I always tell my companion there isn't enough time in the day.  I wish we could see everybody more.  Right after studies and lunch, we proselyte and then it seems like 30 minutes later we are back at the flat, even though its like 8:30 at night.  We have permission to get back at 8 because we never have dinner appointments.  Nobody can afford to feed us.  It's kind of sad.  Sometimes our 2nd counselor in the Branch Presidency feeds us but that is usually it.  We walked about 3 miles to get to this village to visit a less active on Friday night.  She called us the night before and really begged us to come and visit her. She is about 60-70 years old and really really nice. When we got there it was dark, and she had made us food.  But there wasn't a man in the house so we couldn't go inside.  We had asked her if it was okay if we could sit outside (which is what we do a lot if there isn't a man in the house.)  At first she was confused, but we had to explain to her we can't come in if there isn't a man in the house.  We were able to sit on the "porch" of somebody else's house.  And we got to visit with her for a while.  She hasn't been to church in over a year.  A lot of people ask if there is transportation to get to church, because a lot of people say they can't come because of that.  I wish it was different here and everybody in the village had a car- that way they don't have an excuse like that, but most of them don't even try to come. We are really trying to get more people to come to church, it would help out so much.  Hopefully they will realize soon how important it is to come to church to remember the Savior.

I hope you all have a good week! Thanks for the e-mails!
Love you all!
Elder Beilman