Tonga!

Sunday, Feb.2nd

We have decided to have our RS presidency meetings on Sunday mornings at 9:30. Sister Mitchell and I have to drive into town to get there, we hold them at the church. Today the president didn’t come until 10:00. Really! It’s not like we can just run home and come back later, we live 30 minutes away!

Fast and testimony meeting was good as usual. We are having a special fast this month, joining our family and friends at home in fasting for moisture in Cache Valley. We are hearing that there hasn’t been enough snow in the mountains to fill the rivers, lakes and reservoirs when it melts this spring. Without more snow it will be a dry summer with severe water restrictions.

We have 10 people in our Sunday School class now. We have a few more that are talkative now and our discussions are a lot more fun. Before, everyone was so shy and quiet that there were only one or two that would answer questions. We had a great discussion about the life of Christ today. 3 of our class members are getting ready to go to the temple. We are really excited about that!

I conducted RS for the first time today. We had combined opening exercises with the Young Women. Everything went well and I felt good about the changes our new presidency has made to make the opening excercises run smoother and be more concise. We need to give the teachers more time to give their lessons. Sister Mataeli, the president, gave the lesson today. She hates to talk in front of people so she talks so quietly that we could hardly hear her. I hope I can help her to feel more confident.

We had a great time with the missionaries today. The Zone leader, Elder Steele and his companion came for dinner. They work in our ward so we were able to talk to them about some of the people in our Sunday school class. They baptized a couple of them so they know some details that we were not aware of. It was good to get to know about their backgrounds. Elder Steele is a great missionary. He reminds me of our boys. He doesn’t want to be a zone leader. He is tired of having to take care of all of the problems of the other missionaries, he just wants to go out and do missionary work. He plans to go to USU in the fall. We are excited about that. Hopefully we will be able to see him again when he comes home from his mission. I fixed them some spaghetti and garlic bread. They seemed to enjoy it, they ate a ton! Elder Steele’s companion is Tongan, I can’t begin to spell his name. He doesn’t speak much English, but he is a great missionary and we really enjoyed getting to know him better.
While we were eating dinner, Sister Aland called and wanted us to come to a special singing practice for the musical firesides that we are doing. They were learning two new songs. When dinner was over and the missionaries left, we went over to see if they were still practicing. Sadly they were, so we joined them. Most of the mission couple here are looking for things to do, but we aren’t!! For us, it is just one more thing to do!!

When we were watching the weekend news, we saw the story about our Ha’utu Water Project again. We are excited about that. No only because we got to see Alan on TV again, but because they felt like it was important enough to include in the weekend review of the weeks news. It is really good publicity for the church!