Elders Platt and Hendricks at the chicken service project.

Map of St. Lucia, marking the route from Rodney Bay to Sunny Acres.

Rob is enjoying the last month of his mission and will be moving a short distance from Rodney Bay to Sunny Acres in St. Lucia. Here are his notes from this week: 

“St. Lucia is great! Love it here! It’s cool to be surrounded by so many familiar faces. Haven’t had that in a long time. As far as the baptisms go, I’m not too sure I’ll be able to squeeze one out before I leave. A lot of my investigators here are going to take a little while and we just got transfer calls. I’m going to be moving back down to Sunny Acres to be in a tripanionship with Elder Odihambo and Elder Hendricks. Elder Odihambo is super cool and I’m excited to finish my mission with him, so that’ll be fun! He’s from Kenya and came out with Elder Dancan. Sunny Acres is just about a ten minute bus ride from where we are now in Rodney Bay.

You mentioned the sons of Mosiah. The missionary work that takes place in the Book of Mormon (or as people here would say “Book of Dee Mormons”) is very inspiring and helps us recharge when we may have had a tough week with our investigators. I’m also very pumped to go through the temple with you guys! I’ve missed that a lot! Regarding the cheesecake we made, it was phenomenal!  But mind you, I had a LOT of help from Sister Tasha. So maybe we’ll leave the cheesecakes to Mom. This week has actually gone by fairly quickly! Which is really nice. I’m assuming these last three weeks are gonna sail by! This week I came down with a bit of a flu, so I’ve been trying to recover from that. Today was probably the worst of it so hopefully it just gets better from here? Haha. I don’t know, we’ll see. We haven’t exactly been the most productive we could be because of the sickness. But Jana gave me some really good advice to take a lot more pictures and videos for my last few weeks out here and I really need to start doing that too! Sounds like you had a really cool testimony meeting over there! Missionary work truly is a sacred calling! I like how Brother Shoemaker made the bold statement to say a prayer and people had the soft hearts to feel the difference it made. Kinda cool, cuz that’s what Dad was talking about in his email too!  About taking a stand and doing what is right. I love it! I feel like as members of the church we have a lot of opportunity to do that, you know? So many things that the world deems “okay,” it’s nice that we can remember who we are and what we stand for.

You asked about the chicken service project. Haha. So Elder Hendricks and I got a call from a member to come and kill a few chickens for her. Haha. I don’t know what I was expecting, but dang, those things can RUN! Elder Hendricks and I were running all over the place with our cutlasses trying to get them! I ended up getting one in the back end of a house. Lol. It tried to fly over me but I cut it down as it flew up!  It was way fun. We had a person walk by and said, “You no bushman! You can’t catch dem fowls, mon!” Haha. From that point forward it was game on, and I wasn’t leaving till I caught myself a chicken. I let one of the kids borrow my slingshot and he helped me out a lot, too. They were talking about it at church on Sunday. Haha. Saying things like “When are you coming to catch fowls again?” It was a good time! Pretty sure that’s what got me sick, though. #worthit;). Anyways, hope all is well back home. I’ll be seeing you guys in no time! Three more weeks! Thanks for putting a package together. You didn’t have to do that, though! I’ll be home soon, but I do appreciate it. Funny thing is I’ll be back in Sunny Acres for my birthday… again! Haha. Maybe Christina will make me some food. Either way should be lots of fun! Anyways, miss you guys. Hope you are doing good! Love you!”

Looks like a bushman to me.