Sunday, March 23rd
We had a lot of rain today and it looks like that will continue for the rest of the week. We are planning to have a closing ceremony this next week, so we hope there will be some nice dry times during the days, so we can get that done.
At the end of our Relief Society Presidency meeting this morning, our RS president said to me, “Elone said that we should give our talks today that we didn’t give last week, but I said no.” I just looked at her and thought, are you kidding? We MIGHT be the speakers in Sacrament Meeting and he didn’t even tell us? I went into the meeting not knowing if we were speaking or not. Gratefully, they had asked other people to speak and they all showed up except one. The Bishop filled in for the one that didn’t come. Evidently that is why Elone said that to Diana, he was afraid that none of them would come and he wanted all of his bases covered. ONLY IN TONGA!!
Our Sunday School class was really good today. Everyone was back to church today so we had a big class again. Lots of people have been sick and that bug is still going around. Paki is leaving for New Zealand tomorrow and won’t be back until after we have gone home. We will miss her!! How grateful we are that we got to know her and spend as much time with her as we did. Her husband is staying here so we will still see him every week and get to hear about how she is doing. She is going with some of her family members to pick kiwi for 7 months. She can make so much more money doing that than she can make doing anything here, it was an opportunity that she just couldn’t pass up.
I talked to Lopeti today about the 4 boys that he is working to adopt. The members of the ward were supposed to bring donations of clothes and shoes to help them this last Tuesday, but no one brought anything. We gave him some money to buy them shoes and next week we will bring school kits for all of them to help them with their school expenses. My heart just goes out to them and every time I see them I want to hug them. Lopeti and his wife are wonderful and they are doing all they can, but the people here just barely get by and they don’t have any extra to give away unless they sacrifice what they are using themselves. We are grateful that we are here and can help them at least get started as they try to pull these sweet young men into their family. We just wish we could do more.
We tried to go for a walk tonight but we only made it around once before it started to rain. We cut through the campus and once safely home we spent the night reading.
