Tonga!

Monday, Feb. 3rd

We had another phone conference with the Area Presidency and SLC today, so I had to finish adding all of the current charges to the financial report. I’m ready to kill the Hamblins at the Mission Office. They are the worst ones for getting the information to me. I even had Howard email them today to get the receipts sent to me, but by noon I still didn’t have them so I just sent the report in without them. I know the Area is going to be mad when they see some large amounts show up out of nowhere, but I don’t know what else to do about it. I’m tired of worrying about this, I have other things to focus on.

As I was trying to finish up that report, Alan was standing over me, pressuring me to hurry because the Super Bowl was starting. Once I was done, we jumped in the car and headed for home. Last year Elder Johnson said that he was able to watch it on the Tongan TV channel. No such luck this year. Alan turned the channel a dozen times, (we only have 2 channels!) hoping it would magically appear, but it never did. He was so disappointed. It’s probably a good thing, our phone conference was at 2:00 and that would have been right at the end of the game.

The phone conference went well. There was a lot of talk about housing this time. The church is going to build some basic homes for the members that lost everything and help rebuild the homes of others. I thought it was really interesting until they started talking about how much it would cost. When they got up into the millions of dollars I panicked! I am praying that I don’t have anything to do with that part of the accounting. Hopefully it will all be done by the contractors. I didn’t dare ask.
We had a wonderful FHE tonight. Elder and Sister Funaki were in charge. They are both Tongan and they graduated from Liahona High School back in the 60’s. He was a professor at BYU Hawaii until he retired and came here on a mission. They had a lot to do with the Tongan village at the Polynesian Cultural Center. They just had their 50th anniversary over there last summer and Elder and Sister Funaki were in charge of the Tongan part. They showed us a video of the music and dances that they did in the show and then we talked them into dancing for us. They are both wonderful Tongan dancers and they sang as they danced. Sister Kinikini’s father wrote the music that they were dancing to, so she sang along with them. It was wonderful -- truly an authentic cultural experience. The only bad thing about it was that I didn’t have my camera!!!