January 5, 2014

Dear Family,

Happy New Year to you all, too. New Years was a little uneventful for
us--probably because it rained Dec. 31st all day and all night,
keeping the drunks at bay--but we did have a nice little celebration
on the 1st with some members. I don't know if I talked about this last
year, but to celebrate the new year, Kosraeans do this thing called
fwifwi. This pretty much includes splashing as much water as you can
on each other. People are lined up all along the road with buckets of
water ready to splash anybody who comes by. We had a pretty good
time:) Midnight just had a lot of kids singing, which was pretty cool,
but I only heard about 10 minutes of it before I was gone again.

Ninac Esmina is doing really well. She has been sick for the last
couple of days, but is now doing well enough to meet with us again.
She has a member friend who has been talking to her about the church,
and she keeps learning more and more that she really likes about it.
Thank you so much for your prayers in her behalf. She has had miracles
happen to her.

I just got a big load of Christmas mail. A big Thank You to everybody.
I will try to reply to you all promptly, but that may take another 5
months...

The Book of Mormon translation is going on. One of the guys here is
driving the entire system crazy. The instructions were to just catch
any grammatical errors or any glaring doctrinal errors, as this is the
last edit. In fact, the paper said that it was to take no longer than
20 hours and was supposed to be done by Christmas. But this guy keeps
trying to slip in personal preferences under the title of "doctrinal
errors" that is driving the Salt Lake guy nuts. It is actually kind of
funny. They've got two other guys working on it, so they probably
won't take his review too seriously.

Snow time there sounds like it's pretty good. I'm glad you were able
to take some advantage over it. Those were some pretty dang great
pictures.

Things are going really well. I just got a note from Dustin in
Argentina. Sounds like he's doing great.

I love you all and am very happy.

Love,
Elder Gerber

PS--I sent a package home the other day and pulled out $10 to cover
the cost. It should get there within the month.