president

Thursday, October 31, 2013

I spent all day Tuesday trying to catch up. I didn’t make it! I still have the finances for the month of October to finish and information for the Asbestos project to gather.

We spent most of the morning at the Central Pharmacy getting the project there started. We are excited to have this finally under way. The volunteers showed up 2 hours late --- Tongan time! --- but they did come. We had to run around town and buy tape and paper for them to cover all the windows and some sandpaper so they could sand a the wood areas. We got them started, took some pictures and then had to leave. Just as we were leaving, Sione Tonga, our champion on the Lavengatonga Water Project, called to tell us that they were starting to put the water stand up in Lavengatonga. We knew this was going to happen, but we didn’t expect it all to happen on the same day! We will go out there tomorrow to do some hygiene training, we can take some pictures then. There just wasn’t any time to drive out there today.

We grabbed a quick lunch down town because we had a home teaching appointment at 3:00 and then a meeting with the Tonga Trust Board at 4:00. That was an interesting meeting. The lady that is the Director of this Trust Board is in our ward. She is somewhere in her 80”s and we found out today that she is one of the wealthiest people in Tonga. She volunteers her time on this board to help the poorest of the poor in Tonga. We met with her, Elder Hamblin and President Tupou to see how we can all work together to be of service to the people here. We are trying to find service projects that we can do where the missionaries will be the man power. We have some good ideas but we will have to wait a little while to put them into action. She will be leaving for Europe and then America next week and she won’t be back until the end of January. She has groups all over the islands that are already organized to work with the poor. We are hoping to help them with hygiene training too. Using the missionaries to do service projects in the villages will help the non-members to see what the church is really like. We are excited about starting some of these projects.

We didn’t get home until after 6:00. We were beat!