GPS TRACKING

Our handy dandy GPS Tracker

Going up to Morsal

Starting in October of last year we were given a GPS tracking device to locate members using North and East coordinates.  Our assignment was to get a copy of the members living in each of the two different branches, find their home, and record coordinates for their location.  It has taken us about 3 months to complete this for all of the members who live here on Kosrae.  No one has an address here such as a house number or even a street name.  There are 4 main municipalities on the island and numberous smaller areas associated with each municipality.  Each smaller cluster of homes has its own name.  The people living here on the island know all of these smaller groups and their names, but for us it took a lot more figuring out. 

We took a member of each of the different branches with us as we went out searching for homes.  Without them I don't think we would have found everyone.  Some of them lived off the main road and back in against the mountain.  I didn't even know some of these roads existed.  We traveled down some very small narrow roadways covered with lots of green over growth and when we went after rainy days it was even more muddy than usual.  A nice 4 wheel drive vehicle would have been better than our Yaris that scraped bottom more than once.

Elder Wright recording the location of our house.

We found many wonderful people as we have been doing this and everyone that we met was very friendly as are most of the people living on this island.  We tracked all members; those who are very active and those who are less active.  This was our first time meeting many of them. 
Elder Wright liked driving the car and taking pictures so there are not as many pictures of him doing this, but he was very involved also.  He talked to the members as I recorded the readings.

Now that we are finished, this information will be given to our Mission President.  This will be helpful as they plan for building locations and even smaller groups that can meet together more often.  With transportation being one of the major challenges on the island this will allow them to start some smaller Church groups where there are a concentration of members living.