Tonga!

Wednesday, Feb. 19th

We stopped at the hospital on the way into work to pick up one of the boys that puts the wheelchairs together. He wasn’t there. We waited for half an hour and when he still wasn’t there, we left. Just as we were getting to the office he called. He gets to work on a bus and today the bus was really late. He felt so bad. That’s how public transportation is in Tonga, slow and undependable. We will try again tomorrow. We have a lot of wheelchairs that need to be assembled and delivered. Our assessors are doing a great job!

Alan’s computer has been giving him fits and he complained about it yesterday in an email to New Zealand. Today when we got to the office there was a whole string of emails all the way from SLC telling the technical guys to either fix it or replace it - NOW! Wow, he should have complained a long time ago. We had a man in our office before noon and by 3:00 it was fixed. We think. We’ll see how it does tomorrow.

We also had a flood in our office today. We thought it might have been from the rain, we have been having so much. But it didn’t come through the roof. We discovered that it was from the air conditioner. The man came to fix it just as we were getting ready to leave. You can’t work in an office without air conditioning right now. When we leave the office and go outside, our sun glasses fog up because it is nice and cool inside and so blessed hot and humid outside.

I have a list of 27 things I need to get done this week and I got 4 of them done today. That would be good, but I added 5 more by noon. I’m trying to figure out a way to get ahead and I keep falling farther behind. Oh well, this is Tonga, I’ll do it tomorrow. The helping hands vest arrived today. A little late, the mission president is pulling all of the extra missionaries off of Ha’api this weekend, but we can put them in the emergency container. It’s good to have them.

We got a call from the town officer in Lavengatonga today. They are complaining about something else now. Sam, our contractor is coming back to Tonga tomorrow. We will have to get him and his engineer to meet us and the town officer at the site on Friday and get this whole thing straightened out. We have got to finish up this project!!! Alan has had it with the whole thing and his blood pressure goes up every time the phone rings now.

When we got home Alan went to the mission office to talk to Elder Hamblin about the projects that the president wants us to do. I stayed home and worked on the spreadsheet for Cyclone Ian. Things have started to slow down a little and I haven’t had to many new charges this week. That is a relief for me! I’m grateful.

We called Tiff this afternoon and had a good visit. Our phone that we can call home on isn’t working well. There was static on her end and then all of a sudden we got cut off. We have got to figure out how to facetime with her, that works a lot better.