the haps day

oh yes. the haps.

the flight an everything was really sweet.. actually it was really average. but i always love going on a 747 so that was pretty special. traveling with a group of people is always really enjoyable too.. minus terminal walking and stuff and looking out for slow people / wandery people... independence is where that is at. still solid though... once we got to fiji things started to go wrong right away though. for some reason rasa's visa wasn't on the same level as ours and wasn't acceptable, so we had to pay $95 to get her into the country, no big deal but still sucky. what is worse than all of that though is our ability to stay in the country... apparently we weren't supposed to say we were coming here for missions and because of that our visas didn't work or something... they stamped us in but only for 2 weeks. so i think today is the day it all gets taken care of (its no biggy... we prayed straight away an i'm pretty sure God is gonna allow us to stay. flippin satan... bein a buggar cuz he knows we area threat) so that was a pretty stressful beginning to our fiji trip.

things are pretty solid now though... we are staying with an awesome family in lautoka, we met the church yesterday and they are also really solid. and we keep running into joe's team who is also in lautoka so that is pretty fun. we hadn't even been separated more than 24 hours but it was still a rush to see familiar faces.. fiji is hot. its considered a 3rd world country and i see some aspects of it, but its not too bad. its not like we are living in slums or anything like that... it's probably a nicer neighborhood but we still shouldn't be walking around by ourselves or at night. lots of houses are compounds and have barbed wire fences all over... and there are dogs everywhere. not so much in the street, but if one starts barking the whole neighborhood goes. our family is amazing though.. a little one year old named jere, 9 year old junior (george), 12 year old daughter tali and another son i think around our age. george and his wife rachel take pretty good care of us... its not so much culture shock for me as it is 'be cautious of what you do' shock.. i don't want to make anyone upset at my lack of manners for somethings. just a lot of differences with our culture, but life is still life. food is amaaaazing... so far, its only been two days so i'm still waiting for when i have to grimace.

were gonna be working a lot in the indian community (at least door knocking) and that starts tomorrow morning! we just bought all our sulus and bula's today so were gonna look full on missionary tomorrow. we ran into joe an them at the shop as well. surprises... i have so little time on here and pictures will have to wait for a free day when we aren't just getting supplies and letting people know we got here ok.

mom'n dad, if you need to call me call the base in NZ and they will get you the number for where i'm staying, buuuut.... probably only if it is an emergency. otherwise i wont' talk to you or anyone else for 6 weeks. email will be slow too, mebe if i'm lucky once a week. same as this! i'll gather some stories and pick out some good ones to share... still really excited, not as sweaty as i thought, and really happy to be here. pray for us!