Tonga!

Thursday, August 8th

Happy Birthday to Alli --- in Tonga! We are thinking about her and missing her, but we won’t call her until tomorrow.

I wrote up the journal of what we did in July and got it off to Elder Reynolds. That’s pretty good, it’s only the 8th of August after all. It scares me, I’m starting to function on Tongan time. “No worries, you can always do it tomorrow.” I also recorded our progress for the month on all of our projects on CHAS. That is a relief. All of this detail work lays heavy on my mind. I’m not used to working in an office.

We had a surprise visit from our DTA, Terry Oaks today. He is the Director of Temporal Affairs for the South Pacific. It was nice to sit down and visit one on one with him. We were able to tell him about our projects and we asked him about the internet. We did not like his answer. He told us that Fiber Optics has now made it to the Liahona campus but the church has a contract with the Satalite provider and they need to get out of that contract before we can hook onto Fiber Optics. We still have 2 years left on the contract and we pay $50,000 dollars a month, so it might not be easy to get out of that contract. The Area Presidency will have a meeting about that next week. So it is a wait and see deal for now. We were really hopeful that we would have better internet access soon. Now we’re not so sure.

After lunch I finished up what needed to be done in the office and Alan picked up the tickets for Dr. Williams, our dentist. He and his wife will be going to 3 islands to see about dental clinics. We did the ground work for him in Vava’u so we are hoping he can make that agreement work. It would be great for the church and great for the people of Vava’u.

It’s Thursday so we headed to the temple tonight. It is our Stake Conference this weekend so there were many of our ward members at the temple tonight, including our Bishop, thank heaven!!! I had my new temple recommend, but the Mission President had not activated it. No one could figure out what to do but since my Bishop was standing right beside me, they let me in. I will have to work that out this next week. Nothing is as easy as it is at home.

We were asked to be the witnesses for the session tonight. Alan was a little nervous about that because of my back but I said we would be happy to do it. I’m so glad I did. It helped me to be able to get up and move a little and one of our ward members went through the temple for the first time tonight. He is in our Sunday School class and we love him. It was very special to be there with him. He has been a member for a year and he has really worked hard to get himself ready to go to the temple. When we met him in the Celestial Room his comment to me was, “I feel like I am in heaven!” He almost was, that is as close to heaven as we can get in this life. What a special, Spiritual night!