Milestones: Week 3 wrap-up in Barbados

 Bonjour,Amies! 

We have reached one of the many mission milestones—one month of service.  It sort of feels like a blur, but we really do love Barbados 🇧🇧.  Our neighbors 🙊 we mentioned previously have been partying it up in celebration of all the Bajan holidays lately, so this morning they were having their own Olympic events on our roof at 6:30 am.  They were super loud! No need for an alarm clock if they make it a daily occurrence.

I spy a monkey on the roof

First off, yes the weather is consistent.  88 degrees each day and with a breeze it’s pretty tolerable; however, we’ve gotten rain daily this week which makes it nice and steamy.  You can’t really tell how old Bajans are and I’m convinced it’s because their skin is always moisturized.  We are 13 degrees north of the equator, so my doctor should be happy that my Vitamin D levels are almost within normal range again. 

Our daily routine consists of 6:30 am wake-up, 7:30-8 am personal study, 8-8:30 am companion study, work 9-5 ish, evenings are varied.
I have a little more flexibility helping missionaries & working on indexing to support the Caribbean project 

Doug LOVES staring at this screen for 8 hours/day

Last week was Emancipation holiday and this week is Kabooment day(don't understand this holiday yet, so not sure what we're celebrating) with parades and all.  We are getting a new business neighbor next to the mission office:  an African import/export bank.  They had their grand walk-through including a tour the Prime Minister attended which necessitated us closing the building and being invited to evacuate the building all afternoon. 
Oistins Fish market
Fun group to hang out with, especially when they tell you to take off work.

We explored the island a little more this week. The island is 21 miles long and 14 miles wide.  There are only a couple main highways and lots of very narrow, windy roads that they call gaps.  That’s code for playing frogger with the other cars in the small spaces that could be called a path in the states 😂.  Doug asked is I’m ready to learn to drive yet….nope! My brain hasn’t switched over to European driving yet.  We explored the east coast which is the Atlantic side, so the coast is a lot more rocky with treacherous waves.  At Ragged Point, we met a guy who had gone spear fishing for lobster.
Gorgeous lobsters
Ragged Point
Drove up the coast a little further to Bath Beach & saw turtles
Bath Springs

We had a mission goal of 15 baptisms for July.  They got 14!  We have a baptism scheduled for the Oistins branch next Saturday.  We’ve kind of fallen in love with the people today.  We, of course, got asked to speak in a few weeks there.  This month the Caribbean has a goal of indexing 40,000 names.  Today we did our first introduction into how to do indexing and did a Break the Fast luncheon afterwards.  We had over 50 people at Sacrament meeting today, so the missionaries did a great job of inviting others to come and see the messages of Jesus Christ and participate in the gathering of Israel.  They did great for their first week indexing an Advanced batch of church records from Dublin Ireland. 
Family History: indexing church records from Ireland
Oistins Branch

On Saturday, we went to the Brighton’s Farmers market with some other senior missionaries.  We got some fresh local produce, which was awesome.  They had other local artisans.  We will definitely go back.  Later, Doug & I traveled up the west coast and found a lovely little gem of beach called Mullen’s bay.  The snorkeling was tremendous with lots of cool fish 🐠 and the water was pristine.  Made for a great p-day.  Yes we do work, but it sure helps when the place you work is just beautiful.  It can be deceiving to the newcomer that everything is old and maybe even run down, but then you find these 💎.
Mullens Bay
That’s our week! Life IS better with sandy toes!

























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