Tonga!

Monday, Feb. 24th

When we got into the office this morning Siua surprised us. He came with a truck from the hospital to pick up some of the wheelchairs and while he was there Mamana showed up too. She had come to pick up the wheelchairs that she had assessed and take them to the people who need them. She told us a little about how happy the people are when they receive their new wheelchair. She said she loves what she is doing to help her people. She is a wonderful woman.

Elder Reynolds needed all the information about the Vava’u Hospital Project today so he will be prepared to go into his meeting with the Area Presidency on Wednesday. It took me most of the morning to get that to him because we kept getting interrupted. First, Sione Tonga, our champion from Lavengatonga came to see us. Alan called him last week. We need to get to the bottom of the problems with that project and get it finished up. The village water master keeps finding things wrong with the tank and tower but he doesn’t tell Sam, our contractor when he is out there working on it. He goes to Sione and complains after Sam is gone. Today we were able to get Sam, the town officer and the water master together out at Lavengatonga and get it all straightened out. Thank heaven for Ana. Some of them don’t speak any English and she was able to talk to all of them and get to the bottom of it. We hope that will be the end of the problems and we can finally have the closing ceremony. We are going to give them a week to get everything cleaned up out there and hopefully that time will help them all to come together again.

We were hoping to take a flight to Ha’api tomorrow and go up to see how much work has been done up there. Today we found out that the flight we were scheduled to take would leave at 9:00, land in Ha’api at 10:00 and leave to come back at 11:00. One hour there was not enough time to make it worth our going up. We are disappointed but hope that we will still have a chance to go.

I took the Ipad over to the technical staff to get some help downloading our LDS email account on it. They did that, no problem, but now we have to put our password in every time we want to use it. THAT IS A PAIN!! Also, they updated everything, which I know needs to be done, but why to these techy people have to change everything every 3 months??? Now we have to learn how to work some of the apps all over again. Don’t they know that old people like things to stay the same for at least a year, any way we do. By then we will be home and our kids and grandkids can help us!

FHE was interesting. We watched a movie about the Tongan Kava Ceremony. We have seen one here so it was fun to hear about the history of the ceremony and see one where the King was a participant. The one we were at was exactly like the Royal Kava Ceremony. That made us feel special!