Tonga!

Monday, March 10th

We had a great turnout at our devotional this morning. The FM group did it and I love it when they are in charge. We always sing in Tongan and they can really fill a room with the most beautiful music!! It was kind of funny though, Howard sent out an email this week saying that attendance at the devotional was mandatory and then he wasn’t there today. He is off island, but it was still funny.
We thought that Ana was in Vava’u with Howard, but she showed up at the office this morning. Evidently they took the small plane, an 8 seater, to Vava’u and there wasn’t enough room for everyone to go. Ana was fine with not flying on that plane, she is scared to death of it and the weather was really bad on Friday.

  We were glad to have her here today. We have 12 wheelchairs that we need to get on the boat tomorrow and 2 x 10,000 Lt. water tanks. It is always easier when she is here to help us with the arrangements because some of the people we need to communicate with don’t speak a lot of English and Alan’s Tongan doesn’t include those terms.

Siua came from the hospital and put all of the wheelchairs that we needed for the main island together for us and then helped us get the others ready to ship. We are really going through these wheelchairs fast! We are already out of 3 different sizes. At this rate they will be gone by the end of the month or at least by April. That’s great, to have them out to the people who need them, but sad that we don’t have any more coming soon.

Elder Reynolds called us while we were driving into work this morning and said that the Vava’u Hospital Project had been approved by the Area Presidency and he wanted me to get it on CHAS, ASAP so he could send it on to SLC. We kind of did that backwards, it is supposed to be on CHAS first, but this is the project that the Area Presidency asked us to do, so it is a little different. That was a little stressful. Putting a project on CHAS is not an easy process but I had a hunch this might happen, so I had most of it already written up. It only took me about an hour to finish it up and send it off. There is still an outside chance, if everything goes smoothly, that we will be here to see that one close, but knowing the way things move over here, we are not holding our breath.

Just as I finished up that project, David called on facetime. They had just had a birthday party for Parx. His birthday isn’t until Tuesday, but they had the party on the weekend because they --- we --- are all anxiously awaiting our new baby!!! It was fun to see Parx and have him show us what he got for his birthday. He has grown up so much and he is really talking so cute now. We miss them all!

We got everything put in order at the office so that we can keep things going while Ana is gone and then we headed for home. I had some work to do on the Mission History and we needed to get ready for FHE.

We were having a game night for FHE tonight, but it didn’t turn out that way. Right now we have quite a few of the senior missionaries that are not crazy about playing games. I think it is because it is so blessed hot, but by 7:00 at night everyone is just exhausted and tonight they just wanted to sit and visit. We watched a few really funny clips that some of them had saved from the internet and we all had a good laugh. We also watched a very sad Mormom clip about bullying. It is really tragic what some people do to others, especially now that they can send things out into cyber space. Then the women started talking about good books to read. I don’t know what the men were talking about but we didn’t go home until almost 10:00! It wasn’t what we had planned, but everyone seemed to enjoy the night.