Visiting Teaching

So my friend, Aspen Torgesen, and I went on our first visiting teaching experience this week. We have 5 local ladies on our list and the only one we caught up with is Lovely. Lovely is a very happy, patient person. She has a life so different from ours that it was truly humbling to give her a ride home from church and realize that she has so few possessions compared to us. My kids were asking all kinds of questions about why she lived in a "hut" and had so many dogs.
I explained to them how Heavenly Father sends us all to different parts of the world with different things and that we are so blessed to have a roof over our head and to have nice things. I was wondering why we were lucky to be born in a nice house with running water and electricity and there are many people out there who aren't.

Aspen and I went to visit Lovely on Monday and she was stressed because her mother's pigs, that she was supposed to be tending, had escaped and run away. She was looking all over for them but they could be anywhere - including on someone else's dinner table. She told us that she can't run the icebox because it takes too much electricity and there are 4 houses that share electricity. She also has no running water. I am so American that I don't really comprehend how that works. (How can someone not have enough electricity? And it makes me feel even more "awesome" that I have 3 freezers at my house and she doesn't even have one.) The Chamorro people buy a lot of canned meat because there is no other way to store it. (spam). Many Chamorros live in "huts" like hers. They are made of 2x4s and then covered in sheet metal. (I know the sheet metal is right, I am just not sure if the 2x4s is right but something is holding this thing up). Some people live in a shipping container that they just put on some land. It is unreal to me.

Here are some pictures of our experience at Lovely's house:

 This is local "tapioca". Also called Yucca. Aspen and I have no idea what you would do with this.

 We did drink the coconut water. It wasn't bad. It was a little difficult to drink out of a coconut that had just been machetied though.

 This is Lovely's house. She is holding a machete so she can open the coconuts for us. We had a good visit with Lovely. She asked us to pray that her husband will accept the Gospel, that she will get accepted into the subsidized housing so she and her kids can be safer, and that she can find the pigs.