Tonga!

Wednesday, July 24th

We packed our bags before we left for work this morning. We aren’t taking much but it seems that you still need a carry on, even just for over night. We are excited about our trip to Vava’u today. It will be fun to get away for a couple of days. We are hoping the weather will cooperate. It has been raining every day for over a week. It was supposed to be sunny and beautiful today but it rained in the night and it was pouring just before we went into work.

We found out when we got to work today that we had a meeting with the Area Public Affairs people this afternoon. No one told us!! We had to cancel it because we would be on our way to the airport at the time of the meeting. The Public Affairs people in Tonga are not really on top of things. We never did see any kind of a report on the Pacific Partnership from them, and that was frustrating after it took me 3 days to send my pictures to them!! We will try to schedule a meeting with the Area people when we get back. They will be here until Saturday.

We had a good flight to Vava’ on the old plane. We were happy to be flying on that one. One of the men from the FM group in Vava’u picked us up at the airport, took us to the hotel so we could sign in and drop off our luggage and then he took us to the Stake Center for our meeting. We met with all of the Stake Presidents on the island of Vava’u, their Public Relations people, Dr. Reynold, the Chief Medical Director of the Hospital and the Head Administrator from the hospital. We went over the list of their requests and tried to determine their most critical needs. We wanted the input from members of the community, that is why we invited the public relations people. Tongans are so shy about sharing their feelings. We didn’t get a lot of feed back from them but they did go over the list and indicate what they thought were the most important items. Dr. Reynold invited us to tour the hospital, which we will do tomorrow.
All in all we felt good about the meeting. We had a good discussion about why they wouldn’t be getting everything they had asked for and we were able to get all of our questions answered in regard to this project. Once again it was our privilege to meet with such outstanding people. Ana was a great help to us. When she felt that they might not really understand what we were saying she would explain it to them in Tongan. Then we know that we are all on the same page. We just couldn’t do this job without her!!

When the meeting was over we picked the Forsyths up (the missionary couple that lives in Vava’u) and we all went out to dinner. We went back to the Mango, the same café that we ate in the last time we were here and had a lovely meal while watching the sailboats out in the bay.

When we got back to the hotel we spent about an hour out on our deck watching a full moon rise over the water. It doesn’t get much better than that! Sooooooooooooo relaxing.

It was a full day but a good one.