Dec. 27th - 30th, 2012
We went into the office for the first time today. We have to leave home about 8:00 AM because it takes 30 minutes to drive down the one lane roads into town. We passed people on bikes, walking and some in cars. You have to yield to dogs and pigs. Most of the cars are old and dented up. All you have to do to get a driver’s license here is pay the money. There’s no test or driving experience required. Pray for us!!
Our office is right across the street from the ocean. If there is a huge storm or tsunami here it will be gone. Don’t worry, the Lord will protect us and we can watch the weather for approaching storms. There was a pretty good rain storm the other night and our parking lot and some of our building flooded. It isn’t really in the best location but the church has rights to the land and they don’t want to give it up, so we will stay put for the time being.
Tara Smith who is managing the Welfare Office right now came into help us get set up and oriented. She is wonderful. She is just a volunteer but she is really running the show right now because the lady who is paid to work there is in Australia going through cancer treatments. We don’t know when she will be back or if she will even come back to work. Tara will only be here for another month, so we are trying to learn all we can before she leaves. Elder and Sister Sanders were only here for a few months and they left in a hurry because he had cancer, so the whole office is really up in the air. It will take some time to get everything sorted out.
We went out to lunch at a very nice place today, but we won’t be eating out much here. Downtown it costs $18.00 for a hamburger! They have to import everything except what they can grow here so food is very expensive!
Tara took us to 3 beautiful beaches this afternoon. Alan and I decided that it would be fun to go to the beach for New Year’s Eve. We had to check them out and pick the best one. It was a tough job but somebody had to do it. We will go out in the afternoon, have a picnic and maybe swim, then watch the sun set from the beach. Sounds like a good way to welcome the new year to me!
On Friday we went over to the service center, which is right across the street from our house, and used a room there to down load a program I need to get the pictures from my camera onto the computer so I can add them to the Blog --- if I ever get the Blog set up!! I tried to do it at our office yesterday but the internet is so slow there that it would have taken over 2 hours to download. In the service center it only took about 15 minutes. The internet is as good as it gets in Tonga there. It is set up by the church and they monitor it but it still isn’t very fast. But when you consider that Alan had to call home via short wave radio 40 years ago, things have progressed. We were working on our computer and a technical specialist came in and gave us an internet connection that is ours to keep and told us that we could use the conference room over there as an office any time we wanted to as long as there isn’t a meeting scheduled in that room. That will be fabulous. When we have work to do that doesn’t need to be done in our office, we will just go across the street.
The director of the Service Center is on holiday but we met his assistant, Verna, and she took us through the center and introduced us to all the people that work there. She also introduced us to all the people who are a part of the FM group. These are the people that we will be working with when the missionaries need repairs on their houses and they will also help us with bids and finances for projects that we do on this island. They are all very friendly and Alan made instant friends when he spoke to them in Tongan. He is having a hard time remembering the language because every one talks to us in English. Still, they are really impressed at how well he speaks. He spends time every day working to get the language back. When we were through with the tour Verna took us to lunch. We went to a little café called “Friends”. They had wonderful food! I had chicken and rice and Alan had a Tuna Steak. It was expensive but great. Verna is well connected and while we were there she introduced us to a man who is a Noble here and he is also a member of Parliament. He is a member of the church and he was very excited to meet us. He will be a great help with some of the work we will be doing here.
When we got home we called Tiff on the phone we bought yesterday. It is a pay ahead phone, so there is no plan. You just put minutes on it and add more when you need them. We can call the US for $2.50 for the first 4 minutes and then we get 40 more minutes on the same call for free. You can’t beat that! We had a good connection with Tiff so we think it will work well for us. No one can call us because it is terribly expensive to call from the US to Tonga. Skype didn’t work very well on Christmas but Face Time did, so we will at least have a way to keep in touch with the family. There is a delay when you talk, but we expected that.
The Johnson’s invited us to play games at their apartment, so we went. We played Rumi-cube. There were 4 couples there. We played 3 games with 3 different winners. Alan and I won one game so we did alright. David will be proud, I can’t beat him!
We walked early Saturday morning and it was beautiful. No matter what time you leave, you come home sweating! Then we went into town to the fair. It is just like the Renick in Ukraine but they call it a fair here. There are rows and rows of outside booths filled with everything you can think of. The people here have relatives in the United States and they go to Cosco and Sam’s Club and send them all kinds of things to sell. That is how they make their living. We were able to buy a lot of things that we needed but the prices are soooo high here, it takes your breath away. We bought a large jar of peanut butter for the equivalent of $16.00. Wesson Oil was 6 dollars and ice cream is 9 dollars a carton. We will have to be careful and really watch what we buy at the store. On the other hand, the food that they grow on the island is quite reasonable and we are used to eating cabbage, carrots and onions.
After the fair we went to some of the shops in town and I was able to buy a fan to take to church with me. YEA!!! I about melted last week. Then we headed for home and started cleaning again. I tackled the stove and finished cleaning out the cupboards and Alan vacuumed the furniture. We were able to get a vacuum this week and it is really a good one. Things are starting to come together now. I got the grandkids pictures on the wall, my family calendar up and some pictures on the fridge. It is home now!
I cooked my first meal in Tonga today. We have been invited out or have eaten leftovers from those meals every day since we arrived. That has been wonderful, but we were ready to get back on a regular schedule of the food that we are used to eating. The people here eat tons of bread, lots of starchy foods and fried foods. We really don’t want to gain a lot of weight and you can’t help it if you eat that way every day.
We went to movie night tonight. The Senior Couples have a movie night a couple of times a month. They make popcorn and bring treats and tonight we watched “It’s A Wonderful Life”. It’s a classic, but not my favorite Christmas movie. Alan had never seen the whole movie and he thought it was a little depressing. It will be a fun diversion a couple of times a month. It has been a little hard to adjust to this mission. We are used to teaching the gospel and working with the young missionaries and we really miss that. We know that when this holiday is over and things get back to normal we will be busy, but right now we have to much spare time.
I love Sunday’s in Tonga. Everything stops and people spend the day with their families. Nothing is open, it’s against the law to be open on Sunday. Our church meetings are wonderful. We heard from the 2 bishoprics today and then the Stake President closed the meeting. These men are so humble and sincere and the talks they gave were all about setting goals for the new year. How to be better parents, better members of the church and be of more service in the Lord’s kingdom. One bishopric is made up of very young men. They talked about how they didn’t have money to buy presents for their children, but they spent time with their families and what a wonderful Christmas it was. We saw one of them at the fair yesterday. Their family makes doughnuts and muffins and sells them at the fair. That is how they make extra money. They grow the food they eat on their own plantation. What a wonderful family!
I made a meat loaf yesterday so that we would have dinner for today but it turned out that we didn’t need it. A lady in the ward brought us a full Tongan dinner. Alan was in heaven! We had ufi, (like a potato) kamala, (also like a potato only it is purple) lupulu, (corn beef wrapped in taro leafs) and some fresh pineapple and watermelon. Actually it was all pretty good. I’m not crazy about the ufi, there isn’t much flavor but if you put seasoning salt on it, its not too bad. That was so thoughtful of her. The people here are incredibly generous.
Later in the afternoon I made chocolate chip cookies. I bought what I thought were chocolate chips but they are little tiny oblong pieces of chocolate. Oh well, they taste good so they will work. The first batch turned out great but the second one took forever to cook, in fact it never did cook. The oven stopped working. We have a short in the wiring. It took me all the rest of the day to get those cookies baked. I guess that is what you get for baking on Sunday!
When it cooled off a little, we decided to go for a walk. We like to walk through the school grounds and then out onto the church plantation. They have a lot of cattle out there and they also grow coconuts and other crops. Tonight we came on to a bull that really wanted to be in where the cows were. He was making a lot of noise and just as we got up to where he was he came under the fence! He was huge and we were scared! We took off running because in America bulls are usually very aggressive. But this one wasn’t. He was more interested in the cows than he was in us, thank heaven. We walked back to the school and reported that he was out, so hopefully someone took care of that.
