Exciting Weekend

We finally had a few moments to finish unpacking, do some final shopping and meet our other mission brothers and sisters. We are settling into our new apartment and adding a few touches that makes it feel like home like putting up a painting done by our granddaughter, Layla. We are close enough to where we will commonly be going that we ordered new bicycles for ourselves. They are nothing fancy, just single speed cruiser bikes but they will give us an opportunity for exercise and to save a little money on gas. Saturday, we posed with the other members of our mission along with President and Sister Bassett (our mission president) in front of the Laie Temple. It was the first temple built outside of Utah (except for Kirtland and Nauvoo of course). I believe it was dedicated in 1918. if you expand this picture, we are on the left side in the middle of the pack.

We also attended Church in our newly-assigned ward (The Kahuku 3rd Ward - Tongan speaking). We were thrilled to be able to sing the hymns with them because Tongan is similar to Samoan. We also discovered that the ward mission leader flew back with us on our flight here from Seattle. We think this is a little more than a coincidence. We met his whole family on the plane and got to know them on the way here. It was wonderful to find a friendly face in our new ward. Of course the big area of concern today at church was the erruption of a volcano near Tonga and the resulting tsunami in their homeland yesterday. Everyone is praying for the safety and welfare of the people in Tonga.