Tonga!

Wednesday, March 5th

It rained all night again last night. So far this hasn’t been to bad, it rains mostly at night and in the daytime it is just partly cloudy so we still get to see the sunshine now and then. I hate it when we go for days on end without seeing the sun.

We had another adventure at the office this morning. We were in our office working when Ana came running in telling us to come out to the parking lot, she needed our help. When we got out there we found 3 trucks and a group of men unloading root crops into our garage area. They had gone with Ana to meet the boat from Eua. The members in Eua had sent a ton of food to us to ship up to Ha’api on Friday. On the way back from the dock, Ana had stopped by a couple of stores to pick up some food to feed them for breakfast. We had bread, butter, corned beef and drinks. She told us to cut each loaf of bread in half and then split the half not quite all the way through. Then we put a large slab of butter in there and topped it with a generous helping of corned beef. Those men went crazy over that. They love it!! They call it a Tongan breakfast. (yuck) It was fun to meet those men and we are so grateful for their help in moving the root crops. They will come back on Friday and load those crops up again to take back to the dock to ship to Ha’api. We couldn’t do this without them.

We got a lot done today. I wrote an email report about the wheelchairs and sent it to Elder Schnebly in SLC. Within 30 minutes it had gone to the head man over wheelchair distribution for the church, and then to New Zealand to see if we would be willing to do another wheelchair project in Tonga. New Zealand wrote to us and we will work with Ana to put together another project, but we won’t be here to see the wheelchairs arrive. We are praying that another couple will come here as Humanitarian Missionaries soon. We are going to bury Ana with unfinished projects if she doesn’t get some help.
We also got some of our bids back for the supplies needed to refill the emergency container. Pacific Timber, a hardware store here, had sent us one page of their bid, but they never sent the rest of it. We have asked for it a couple of time but today Ana got on the phone and called them. She told them the deadline had passed and if they wanted to be considered that they had better put someone in a car and deliver the rest of it to our office by 2:00. Sure enough, it arrived on time and it was delivered by a Stake President! Ana is amazing. When she tells people to do something, it gets done!

We didn’t get home for lunch today until 3:30. It wasn’t really that bad. We had some of the bread this morning, with a lot less butter and no corned beef. But that, plus a diet coke helped us make it through the day.

We got an email today that the air conditioner remote had been replaced in our office at Liahona. We checked on it when we walked tonight and everything is working great now. YEA!!! Things are finally back to normal. We are spending a lot more time down town now, but with a new baby coming we need to have quick access to the internet.

Alan went to the “Master” to have a massage today. Tonight he is complaining about his back hurting and he said that he feels like he’s been run over by a truck. REALLY??? And he wants me to feel sorry for him?? So far he doesn’t have any black and blue marks showing up on his back so I am reserving my sympathy until things get worse. He even had the audacity to tell me that he thinks I should go back. NO CHANCE OF THAT!!