Well, the branch I’m serving in has a long and troubled history. Many moons ago they had an incredibly overzealous Branch President who excommunicated basically half of the members. So the Branch is a lot smaller and weaker than it really should be. Many of the excommunications were eventually revoked, but by then, the damage had been done and the people wanted nothing to do with the church. There are many who say if they do end up coming back to church, they are more likely to go to Oamaru instead of Timaru, due to memories of the place, even though all of the leadership involved is no longer living in Timaru, or active for that matter. The Timaru Branch has many older Maoris, all of whom are very nice people. Many members of the Branch always want to feed us, but because we are so far away or because of different rules, they are not always able to do so, which they don't like.
Waimate has a population of about 3500 or something like that. Timaru is a lot bigger. You can tell the population of a town by the number of grocery stores. Waimate has a single New World, but Timaru has several Countdowns, a Pac'n'Save, a Warehouse Extra, New Worlds, and 2 Coupland Bakeries. Between the two towns there is a lot of farm land and a few towns much smaller than Waimate. One of them is called Makikihi, and we walked all 30ish houses in just a few hours.
The people of South Canterbury have a large range of personalities, much like anywhere. Some will be genuinely interested, others will politely tell us they are not, and others will get aggressively angry at us for even having the nerve to exist and to live in the area.
In Waimate, I think we are a few K's from the coast, because of the way the highway changes to come to Waimate. We drive past a beach every time we go to Timaru. It is a cobble beach, but different than the one in Oregon. Rather than spherical black stones, they are all flat and circular, like skipping stones. We went to the beach once. Timaru is also right on the water. We go street contacting around Caroline Bay on Sundays sometimes.
P-days, we email, go shopping if we need to, laundry, clean, and then maybe walk around town. Last week we tried playing some tennis with some rackets we took from the Timaru flat. This week we are going to play some basketball with J. M. We also do Family Home Evening with the M family every Monday. That is how we get basically our only Member Present Lesson every week.
The Strawberry Fare went pretty good. The Strawberry Fare was very similar to the Swiss Days event up in Heber or Park City, if that helps explain kind of how it was. We talked to as many people as we could, trying to give out as many pass along cards and DVDs as possible.
Through the week, we have just been trying to visit all of our potential investigators and try to set up appointments for when we can come and teach them. Because of the mentality of the people, it is very hard to nail down an appointment, and if you do, it falls through pretty often. All of the time not spent doing that, we are out finding, trying to get to 150 people talked to. We do that by knocking doors, talking to people on the street, and any other ways we can think of. We have knocked every street in Waimate, so we are going back to streets now, knocking on the houses that didn't answer the first time. We keep track while knocking of the houses that don't answer just for this purpose. We also went to the small town of Makikihi, and knocked on every house in about 2 hours, approximately 30 houses in total. We are also trying to do as mush service as possible, whether for members or nonmembers. On Christmas day, we will be giving service at a Community Christmas Dinner for several hours. The dinner is for those in Waimate who have no one to have Christmas with, or for those individuals and families who simply can't afford it this year.
We had dinner with the P family yesterday. President P is the Branch President in the Timaru Branch, and we have had dinner with them once before. I think that is pretty much the week this week. Lots of finding.
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