Tonga!

Friday, Feb. 14th,

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!!!

We met with Ana first thing this morning to go over the assignments that we received from the conference call yesterday. We always come away from those calls with a list of things to do. This week we had to buy 3 x 100,000 liter water tanks and put them on the ferry to Ha’api. Then we had the water truck go to Liahona, fill up with clean water and take it to the Warf and fill the tanks. The tanks go to Ha’api, the truck up there sucks the water out and takes it to the chapels to fill their water tanks. Then the empty tanks come back on the ferry and we do it all again. It is cheaper than buying water to send up and eventually the tanks will end up at the churches in Ha’api. We also sent up more chain saws and the files to sharpen them. We have sent up 23 now. Sure hope we get at least some of them back!! We know we will never see them all again.

Elder Reynolds called us today to thank us for all we are doing in this relief effort. He is so kind. He knows that we are the ones doing all of the leg work and he is really grateful. He was especially complimentary to Ana. She works with NEMO, the government emergency organization here and she has spent countless hours in meetings representing the church. She knows all of the important people and she has saved the church thousands of dollars by getting the government to pay most of the shipping costs on the items we are sending up. She really is amazing and we are so grateful that someone appreciates her, besides us!
We talked with Elder Reynolds about all of our projects and how to get them closed out. We are worried that we won’t have much to do that last month or so but the Area Office won’t let us start any more projects. It takes months to get anything done here and they don’t want us to leave things undone for fear they will never get finished. Then at the end of the conversation, Elder Reynolds told us that our Nukuhetulu Project has been APPROVED!!!! I can’t believe he did that. He was able to get the Area Presidency to approve it before the Apostles arrived. He started at the top and is working his way back. We don’t have all of the other signatures yet, but once the Presidency approves it, it is approved so he told us to go ahead with it. He knows we need to get the equipment ordered because it takes a long time to get it shipped here. He is amazing!!! Without him, this project would never have been completed before we go home. Now there is a chance! We are praying we can get it completely finished before we leave.

We had to make a trip back to town to pick up more things to send to Ha’api so we decided to make the trip count. We did some shopping and then we went out to dinner for Valentines Day. We went to Little Italy a really nice restaurant right on the shore line. We had a beautiful view of the ocean, there was a slight breeze and the food was wonderful. It doesn’t get any better than that.
We were supposed to have a Valentines Day Social in our ward tonight but it didn’t happen. Evidently SLC has put money in the budgets for the wards here, but it hasn’t come through. The bishop didn’t have the money to give the people to make the refreshment, so the party was postponed. We aren’t sure when we will have it. There was only one problem with that. I didn’t wait for the ward to give me the money for my cookies. I made them early in the week. Now I have 200 cookies and no party. Where are my grandkids?????