Tonga!

Jan. 6th, 2014

First thing this morning we went to the devotional. Howard Niu conducted it. He is supposed to be on vacation, but there is nowhere to go, so he came in to work. He said that he would only work a little while and then go home, but he scheduled a meeting with us at 8:30 tomorrow morning, so it sounds like his vacation will be a little here and a little there. It reminded me of Andy Griffith and how he had to get out of town. Howard needs to go to the beach and leave his phone home!

We found out today that we will be having a visiting General Authority in February. It will be Neil L. Anderson. Our Mission President said that he will hold a 2 hour meeting with the missionaries while he is here. That should be fun!

Alan had a meeting scheduled to talk to the Bishop that helped him with the Central Pharmacy project. They are trying to make the man who was supposed to clean the floors bring the chemicals back and get the job done. We need to close out that project. Alan knew the Bishop wouldn’t be on time and he wasn’t. We had another meeting at 11:00 so they had to talk on the phone and we are praying that this will finally happen. The man has promised to have it done by tomorrow night. We’ll see.
Our next meeting was with the head of a company that cleans sema-vis here in Tonga. A sema-vi is the water catchment container that catches and stores rainwater so the people will have drinking water. They don’t clean them regularly and they get so dirty inside. We are trying to find a way to use the missionaries to help this company so that the cost can be lowered and at least the schools and clinics can have clean drinking water. The missionaries will do it as a service project and the head of the company has already started working on schools and he is doing it for free. He wants to help the children and he knows this will prevent a lot of illnesses. We had a good meeting with them and I was impressed at the desire of this young man to help the people here and how willing he is to forgo making a lot of money to just get the work done where it is needed the most. He is a member of the church. He used to live in America, but he was deported. He came back to Tonga to start over, found the church and he has turned his life around. He is the third man that we have met that has been deported, joined the church and now they are all doing really good things for this kingdom. Repentance is real and the healing is amazing!

The Dassler’s did FHE tonight. The lesson was on developing Christ like attributes. We did the quiz in Preach My Gospel. It is good to take that every once in awhile and then see where you need to change things. We have been encouraging our kids and grandkids to do the same thing and work on one attribute every month. I don’t know if they are doing it or not, but I am and it has been amazing to see how many times that one attribute pops into your life in a month when you are really thinking about it. I hope I am doing better.
After FHE was over we had a short choir practice. The Mission President is putting on musical firesides all over the island and he wants the senior missionaries to participate. This is the first time in his life that Alan has ever been in a choir, but he is doing it. We will be singing “I Am A Child Of God” with the last verse in Tongan. It should be a good experience.