Garrison’s Virgin Island View

Welp....here we are at week 32!  The best thing that happened this week was that we got Elders back to our island after being gone since the last part of May.  So we are excited about that!  It will be a bit difficult for them at first though because neither one of them have been here before, so they have to learn about it and find places and meet people without another Elder to lead the way, so we will try to help them as best we can.  But we are pretty lame..... Elder Niederhauser and Elder Sigcha will be serving here in St.  Thomas.   Elder Hanson and Elder Makaafi will be in Tortola! It is amazing how close these Elders get even after just serving together for one transfer.  Friends for life. We said good-bye to Elder Cox .  He is off to Puerto Rico to be a Zone Leader and he will do great! Meanwhile in the real world, all the grandkids are back in school again. Hard to believe that we have a s...

This week we got word that we are going to get young Elders back to our island!   I cannot tell you how happy that makes us!  They fly in next Monday, so we are looking forward to that!  This week on Tuesday, we celebrated our 4 3rd wedding anniversary, so we switched up Preparation day and had it on Tuesday.(Although as Senior Missionaries, we can really have time off anytime and we do kind of just set our own agenda.)   After District Meeting and taking care of a little bit of business we went to the beach and then got cleaned up and went out for our favorite place on the island that has great Tacos!  It was a fun day.  We are so thankful for our eternal marriage and especially for the children that we have been blessed to be parents to and the families that they have created.   Don't know how we got to be so blessed!  The week went by pretty much the same as most weeks until Thursday and that night we held our first Self Reliance Cla...

Here we are at week 30. Hard to believe that we have been here almost 1/3 of our mission.  Somedays it feels like we have been here 300 weeks, and then again some weeks seems to fly by.  This week was kind of in-between that.  Because the weeks are somewhat the same, it is tempting to not write every week, but I am using it for our "Mission Journal" so I should press on right? It was a small turn out for Branch Family Home Evening on Monday night, but we still had fun.  We watched a video about a "modern day Good Samaritan" and discussed what that looks like in our own lives and then we played a really fun game of Jeopardy. It was a bit challenging because the sweet sisters on the left speak Spanish, but they won!  Then we had rootbeer floats and cookies.  I have been thinking about the ministering that we do to others.  Many times it is one-on-one,  (or a small group) and I really do think that ministering one-on-one makes a dif...

Well folks, we have been getting some weather here!  On Sunday evening, we were just sitting down to dinner with some friends and the earth started rolling!  Yup!   An earthquake!  I thought we had left those behind in Cali but apparantely they followed us here!  Then that night it started raining like CRa Zy!  I mean buckets full of rain!  So now, we are having flash flood warnings....never a dull moment!  So on top of that, we have major power outages on this island.  They happen all the time, and they can be for hours and in the case of the last hurricanes, MONTHS!  Praying that the hurricanes skip by the Virgin Islands this year and for a few years or forever... .... they deserve a serious break! We have discovered a new fruit here.....called genips.  You bite into them and the hard outer green layer, it peels away easily and then there is a fiberous peach colored flesh around a pretty big pit.  You kind of just s...