Tonga!

Saturday, July 27th

I hate it when we have to get up early on Saturday! But we had a big day planned for today and we needed to run a couple of loads of wash first. In order to wash the sheets, you have to get out of the bed!

Today we made Tongan baskets. Mele, one of the teachers at the high school is teaching us Tongan crafts. She is the one who taught us how to make Tapa and today we learned how to weave baskets. You see them all over in Tonga. People use them on the streets to hold their produce and they use them in their homes to carry garbage out or to carry laundry in. They are made out of coconut tree leaves so they don’t cost anything to make, however you have to get the leaves down trom the top of those coconut trees. Mele was about 45 minutes late starting our lesson today. She had to get her son out of bed and make sure he was awake enough to climb up the trees and get the leaves. We needed 10. Each couple made a basket. I took lots of pictures. It was fun but they are harder to make than they look. From now on I will appreciate those baskets I see all over Tonga.
We finished up the laundry and then went to the Service Center to see if we could Face Time with Kimi and Mike. We were able to eventually find a place where we could get some good time with them. They knew that we were calling and they had dressed Grace in her blessing dress. She looked so beautiful --- I cried. I know that we are where we are supposed to be, doing what the Lord wants us to do and I know that we are being so blessed, but even knowing all that, this is hard. We had a good visit with Kimi and Mike and we were also able to talk to Greg. He was in his room so we were able to see it. Not to bad really. He looked good and he seems to be doing well as long as he can golf. He is living a simple life, eat, sleep, work and golf. Really??!!! There has to be more to life than that. He needs his mother!

We had movie night tonight. Elder Johnson gave us 6 movies to choose from and the one that won was The Great Escape. Most of us had seen it before but I hadn’t seen it for a long time. We all enjoyed it but none of us remembered that it was 3 hours long!! It was late when we got home. We always have treats at movie night and tonight Sister Williams went over the top. She made doughnuts! She made some for their Sunday School class for tomorrow and decided to make some for us too. They tasted good. Probably too good, we all ate more than we should have.