Castries, St. Lucia

We received our first email from Rob in his new area, Castries, St. Lucia. He sounds great - enjoying the beautiful scenery and looking forward to our Skype on Christmas. I told him I'd been pronouncing St. Lucia incorrectly (Saint Loo-CHEE-ah) and asked for confirmation on the correct pronunciation (Saint LOO-sha). Here is his email: "Hey, it's called Castries, St. Lucia and it's freaking beautiful! Holy crap, this place is gorgeous. I never wanna leave. haha. Things here are great! Mostly the scenery and the people. Super cool environment to work in. I love it. So my companion is like super missionary, fresh off the boat, wants to, like, not sleep and just do missionary work. It's pretty exhausting, but it's good! I'm glad I'm with someone who is eager to serve, ya know? But ya, this place is MOUNTAINOUS! But it's SO cool. Like, people live ON the mountains in the middle of a forest! They are hard to get to cuz the hills are really steep, but once you get to a house they always have this amazing view. People here are a lot nicer as well. I'm thinking we're gonna be very successful here. I'm hoping Barbados was just the refiner's fire, you know? Haha. We'll see. It's pronounced Saint Loosha. haha. Can't blame you on that one, it's spelled weird. Kinda like how tire is spelled 'tyre' here. haha. Everything is good here, just trying to plug away and forget about time. Thank you so much for the Christmas package! Everyone got a good kick out of the platypus, considering it's my nickname in Barbados. I have a couple of people I served with in Barbados here in St. Lucia with me, so that's pretty cool! I'll get to teach my first district meeting here tomorrow, so wish me luck. Skype is all set up for Christmas. I'll be Skyping from the church. We're gonna have a Christmas get-together as well, so that should be cool. We share the video "A Savior is Born" a lot with people. We mainly have pass-along cards that direct people to the site, making it REALLY easy to get in contact with people. Although the branch here seems to be a lot smaller than the Christ Church Branch in Barbados, the few that are here seem to be very unified. I think a lot of the unification has to do with people being not as prideful like all the Bajans. haha. Good people, just very prideful. Anyways, miss you guys and hope all is well. Tell Baxter I miss him the most!! And that I'm pretty sure Matthew 5:14-16 refers to him and his gloriousness ;). Bahaha. O, Baxter, what a good dog."