Karratha is awesome. I'm really growing to love the people here as I get to know them better. This week started off pretty slow with a public holiday on Monday and p-day on Tuesday, but it really started to pick up after that. I've met most, if not all, of our investigators that we currently have in this area and we've been able to find a few more people to teach as well. There's a guy in our branch, Taoaso, who served here in 2009, he went home just before I arrived in the mission, and he came back to marry the then Branch President's daughter. I was talking to him the other night when we were at the Otto's house, (brother Otto is the branch mission leader now, but he was branch president when Taoaso was here), and I told him a few of the people that we had taught over the past few days and he knew all of them but one from when he served here. In other words, for some reason, investigators either don't like to progress in this area or all of the past missionaries haven't known how to help them progress properly. I'm going to go with the latter because that gives me more hope for them. One of them is named Fran, she's had missionaries around for 16+ years and she has moved 5 or more times over that 16 years and missionaries always seem to find her. She's never given them her new address, but they always come and knock on her door. She always lets them in, but for some reason, she's not a member. One major stumbling block for her though is that her partner, Roy, is against getting married but they've already been together for at least 16 years. He feels that if they were to get married, then divorce would be imminent, so the best way to avoid divorce in his mind is to not get married in the first place. They would both make great members of the church though. They're very kind, loving, sensible people. I straight up told her yesterday that if missionaries always seem to find you and you're not a member of the church, I think God is trying to tell you something. She just needs to feel the spirit. In our lesson yesterday she just seemed very light about it, which is probably due to how missionaries have been in the past. So our goal for her is to help her feel the spirit and point it out to her and help her realise that the only way to have that feeling with her all the time is to become a member of the church. Our overall goal for all of our investigators is to just evaluate where they're at and decide whether or not we just just drop them. It seems like a lot of them just have us over because they can't say no and because they have had too much fun with missionaries in the past, but we're here to fulfil our purpose, to invite them to come unto Christ by keeping commitments, and we need to let them know that. Elder Naruo and I have a great vision for the future of this area. Proverbs 29:18 - "Where there is no vision, the people perish". We see a lot of good things happening, once we get these investigators headed in the right direction and also replenish our teaching pool with new member referrals.
On Thursday we went for a drive out to Wickham and Roeburne. It was about a 112 km round trip, but we had to go see some members out there that Brother Otto really wanted us to see. It was a nice drive through the dessert at speed limits of 110 km/hr (speeds you usually don't see in Australia, except for in the outback). It was a nice visit in Wickham with a less active lady named Debbie. She told us that the distance has nothing to do with her not coming to church. If she really wanted to come, she could be there. I guess far distances are pretty normal for people to have to drive when they live in the outback. The town of Wickham probably has a population of about 500 people. It took us a total of about 2 minutes and 35 seconds to drive all the way through it, and that's at 60 km/hr, which isn't very fast. Roeburne has a population of about 900, but according to Sister O'Conner, who we visited out there, "they lost a couple this week". Sister O'Conner is semi-active. So visiting those two people out there took up the majority of our day that day because of the distance of driving, and also because it's such a long distance to drive, we felt it appropriate to stay just a bit longer than the normal 15-30 minute visit with members. I wish we could go visit our members out in Pannawonica and Tom Price, but they are just too far away.
I really enjoy working as the Branch Executive Secretary. It's been interesting learning more about how the organisation of the church works. We have Branch Conference this coming Sunday and I've been having to call President Cahoon and call some of the members to arrange interviews with everybody that needs them with President Cahoon. As fun as it is though, I'm looking forward to Branch Conference so an exec sec can actually be called from the branch. Hopefully I'm still able to use this computer though in the Clerk's office for emailing after Elder Naruo and I are released from exec sec and clerk, I think the Library computers up here probably cost money to use. Judging by how much everything else cost around here, I'm sure they wouldn't let us use public computers for free. A McChicken sandwich (on it's own) is 8 bucks, and the $5 foot longs from Subway are actually $9. Petrol is also $1.60/litre, or $6.04/gallon. That's Karratha for you. I'm really loving it though. The weather has actually cooled off a couple of degrees now, so it's perfect weather as well. Trying my best to fit in to this small town. I think sometimes that people can tell I'm a city boy, but I'm OK with that. It's like everybody knows everybody in town and when a newcomer arrives, it's obvious.
That's about it for this week really. I hope yous are all enjoying your summer. Stay safe!
Much Love,
Elder Tanner
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