Fun in the Sun!

 We taught both Institute and Seminary this week.  Needless to say, it went by rapidly.  It was filled not only with lesson preparation but with assembling the Foosball Table.  One revelation that happened after assembly was the fact that with the bars in for the players, it no longer fit through our door.  After a little consultation and concentration, we settled on getting it into the classroom where we teach that has a double-door storage area in it.  That way, we can pull it out after the lesson.  It will have to remain in the classroom but it is much roomier than our office area.  Ping pong continues to be a success as well as the board and card games after the lesson on Wednesday and Thursday nights.  

Foosball

Uno

And Ping Pong

We love working with the young people here.  They are from all over the world and many of them have roots in Tonga and Samoa.  They are kind to us and accept our clumsy attempts to be friends with them.  We attended a ward activity for the YSA 16th ward at Hukilau Beach this Saturday.  They fed us hamburgers and we got to pass out our information for Institute and visit with several of them while we ate.  

Janice and I have been loving swimming every morning.  One of the deterrents however are the bluebottle jellyfish that can sting.  If we see any of these on the beach, we stay out of the water because when they touch you it can really burn like a bee sting.  We have missed a couple of days this week because of it.

Bluebottle Jellyfish on our Beach!

 We had a remarkable experience Friday morning.  No one else was at the beach.  It was just Janice and me swimming.  As we were there, we suddenly were surrounded by turtles.  One swam up to about 2 feet from us.  We just stood there as 4 or 5 turtles would pop their heads up and then swim around us.  We are wondering if they were eating some of the bluebottle jellyfish that were there.  It was magical!

 I found a Yamaha guitar at the Swap Meet for $10.00.  It looked great until I saw that the headpiece and neck had been broken.  I bought it anyway thinking that I might be able to glue and clamp it.  Sure enough, a little wood glue and a couple of C clamps later, it works!  It looks a little worse for wear but makes beautiful music.  We are going to bring this guitar and my ukulele to Institute.  I bet, we will have students who will be able to play and impress each other with music (the language of love).  We are encouraging that sort of thing!

The repaired guitar

The glued neck and headpiece

Pigs, Chickens, and Chicks - Oh My!

 Wow!  This week went by fast.  We are keeping very busy and time is "flying."  Our Institute now has a working ping pong table and the young adults have put a couple of hours playing time on it this week.  We are hoping everything gets approved and that soon, we can open things up on Monday night for the Institute students to come and gather and play.  We were fortunate to catch the last Foosball table at Costco and bought it yesterday.  lt will be a great addition to our post-lesson activities.

We have been spreading the news that there is institute available on Wednesday and Thursday nights.  Everywhere we go, we run into young people who are eligible to  come.  We had over 100 attend this week. Unfortunately, it was 90 in Brother Meyers class and 10 in ours.  We are hoping ours will keep growing.

We visited the family we have been assigned to minister to.  They are delightful.  Toni was off hunting a pig and his wife, Hele sent us this picture.

We hope to get to know them better.  We wish we would have had time to help dress the pig and get it ready for smoking. Perhaps next time we visit, we will get a taste.

Speaking of BBQ, Janice got me a portable BBQ grill for Valentines day and already, we have had hot dogs on the beach and hamburgers on the Lenai.  Janice knows that the way to my heart is good food.  I love her!!!!!

While we were at the beach cooking hot dogs, an older couple came by from Philadelphia.  They are both doctors of psychology and work only a couple of days a week online.  They travel a lot and work from wherever they are.  We invited them to have some hot dogs and they were most complimentary.  Janice had made a mango mustard sauce and pineapple/cilantro relish and it made the dogs really sing!  We had a great visit with them and talked a bit about the Church and what we do on our mission.  

While we were eating a flock of chickens congregated around us waiting for us to leave so they could clean up any crumbs that we dropped on the ground.  Apparently, it is illegal to kill the chickens in any of the islands here because they are a protected species of jungle fowl.  They are prolific!  We have several broods of chicks that roam our yard.  Indeed, some of the chickens look a little different.  We frequently see classified adds advertising for free chickens.  You can live trap them and relocate them.

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  The environment here lends itself to beautiful flowers.  We delight in the beautiful hibiscus, plumeria, and bird-of-paradise flowers that are blooming around our yard and neighborhood.

View of the Temple just behind our house at about 6:30 PM tonight.

Smiles and Flowers!

 

This has been a productive week.  We got the list of potential Young Single Adults out to the Wards who might be interested in attending Institute (about 30 wards).  We have visited the meetings of 2 of those wards to personally invite them to come to institute.  And everywhere we go, we put out the word that we have institute classes in session for those who would like to attend on Wednesdays and Thursdays.  We had 10 attend our class on Wednesday and there were 70 who attended on Thursday night. 

The exciting news is that President Haverly (Laie YSA 1^st Stake) showed up with a ping pong table for us to use after institute classes.  This will be wonderful for those who want to stay and socialize.  I am in the process of putting it together.  I am thinking it would be wise to reinforce the bottom with a couple of 2X4’s on each side.  You never know when an enthusiastic player could accidentally land on the table.  Without the reinforcement, it would surely break.  We have started to settle in to our office.  I go there almost every day.  I ride my bike over and it is a pleasant journey!

Janice in our office

New Ping Pong table under construction

We had a delightful evening on Friday night when a couple of students who are seriously dating came to visit us at our apartment.  We fed them chocolate lava cake and chatted for a couple of hours much to our enjoyment! They are good for each other, and the young man is preparing himself to serve a mission.  He is hurrying because he is 24 years old and will not qualify much longer.

We have been swimming nearly every morning this week in the ocean just a couple of blocks away.  It is a wonderful way to start our day. 

Beach between Laie and Hau'ula

  It is also great physical therapy for my shoulder while I am recovering from surgery.  It is helping Janice’s knees also.  She got cortisone shots in her knees this week and she is greatly relieved of the pain for a little bit.  She really needs to have knee replacements in both legs.  For now, she is a trooper and does the best she can while hurting with every step.  Accordingly, I try to reduce the number of steps she takes each day (for those who know Janice – she is a difficult person to try to hold back). Even with that in mind, we went to the swap meet yesterday in Honolulu to shop and ran into a couple of Chinese dragons.  

Again, we are feeling blessed to be in this beautiful place with the wonderful people we work with.  Everyone is always so nice and considerate to us.  We would certainly entertain the notion of living here at least for part of the year once our mission is complete.  I spent a second after church and snapped a few shots of the flowers that are around us here in our yard.  They smell so good that we often pick a couple of blossoms and bring them into our apartment to make the house smell heavenly. 

We have a plumeria tree in our front yard!

Visiting and Surfing

 This week, we were grateful to get busy and get to work on our assignment.  We are encouraged not only by the scope of the work but the willingness of people here to help us.  We have found out that there are literally thousands of young people that could be benefitting from attending Institute.  Not only for the teachings of Jesus Christ and the hope of His Gospel but the strength they get by being together with each other.  We got the first stake list with hundreds of potential students.  We will receive 3 more stakes in this area.  We have started visiting with our students at their homes and are delighted to get to know them better.

We also got the "green light" to finish clearing out our office and to order a portable ping pong table, foosball table, and several games so the young people have something pleasant to do there with each other.  We will roll these out on Monday nights and on Institute nights after classes.  

We took a little time this week to plant some plants in the landscaping.  We have such wonderful weather year round that you can grow what we nurse along inside as houseplants back home.

Our Front Porch Area

Our new little hibiscus

Sweet Gardenias

This Saturday, we took a break and went over to the surfing competitions on the North Shore.  There are big waves coming-in.  Pipeline Beach had some powerful ones to either give the surfers a thrill or tumble them end over end.  We saw it work both ways!

Surfer at Pipeline Beach  (far left of the wave)

The MTC is finished and now we roll-up our sleeves!

What a busy week this has been. We got up every morning early so we were ready for our CES MTC training. It started in Utah at 8:00 AM but there are 3 hours difference here. We were done by noon however each day. What totally exhausted us was that we had a lot to do and went right through the rest of the day like normal. By Thursday morning, we were pretty done in. We recuperated quickly however and recovered enough to do our monthly shopping on Saturday on the south side of the island. The second day of training was worth its weight in gold. It really helped us get grounded in the mechanics of the lessons we will be teaching. 

A lizard that lives on our faucet.  It must be a good place for bugs!

 We taught an Institute class on Wednesday night. It is the small class so far and was not too stressful. We always attend the Thursday night class also that Brother Meyers teaches. There is usually between 70-90 students in that class. The sweetest thing happened after class when a group of girls approached Janice and asked if I could give one of the girls a priesthood blessing. It is nice to be needed and feel like perhaps through us, the Lord can give these young people some hope. 

We did take time one evening to go to Sunset Beach and watch the sun sink down past the horizon in the water. It happens so fast and is quite spectacular. 

We are loving our location and take the opportunity a lot of the mornings to go swimming in the ocean just a couple of blocks away from our house. The water is warm and soothing. It is helping our joints feel better. We have met a couple of neighbor women who are Samoan and had some delightful visits with them. There is so hope of umu-baked breadfruit and palasami from one of the women’s husband. Their names are Pat and Loni (the two sisters). 

Our bishop was released today in Kahuku 3rd Ward. He is very happy and relieved. Our new bishop is fairly young and we are eager to get to work with him. We introduced ourselves and told him that we are willing to do most anything to help as long as it doesn’t get in the way of our teaching and recruiting activities. We paused a little bit this weekend to reflect on how comfortable we are here and muse a little bit about the possibility of living here. We are surrounded by everything we love except our family and friends. Well, we will have to think on that aspect of it. Regardless, we are blessed here everyday and are excited to be of help here.

MTC in Hawaii

Monday through Thursday, we dressed up in our nice MTC clothes and put on our nametags to join 11 other couples for the online MTC training. Brothers Napeirski and Lucas were our teachers. They did a good job taking us through the basics of the Preach My Gospel manual. Typically, they just work with 4 senior missionary couples each week but this week, there were 12 because some of them had tested positive for COVID and could not attend the in-person training. There were couples assigned to New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Washington D.C., California, Salt Lake, and Tennessee. Here is a picture of our district. We have our Church Educational System (CES) training this coming week.

We are still settling in and getting to know our surroundings. We looked for used bicycles and could not locate any that were reasonably-priced so we finally ordered new ones from Walmart that were $98. Nothing fancy, just one-speed cruiser bikes with coaster brakes. That should be sufficient however because everything is on the level here. It is a short ride to our office (when we get it fixed up and ready) and a even shorter ride to the market and the beach.

Just down from our house is a beautiful beach where we have been swimming every morning. It is at the end of Halela'a street which is the wide street that goes from the ocean up to the temple. Here is a couple of pictures of the beach. One was a spectacular moonrise that took our breath away.

We went to our Institute classes on Wednesday and Thursday nights. We are growing attached to the young people who are there and want to get to know them better. We will start teaching on Wednesday nights this coming week. We also attended the first ever after school Seminary class for students with special needs. It went really well and we will be attending every week to support the teacher (Sister Daniel) who is one of the student's mother and did a fantastic job teaching. Saturday, we participated in a senior missionary activity and rode down to the south part of the Island to Koko Crater Botanical Gardens and Sand Beach park for a picknic. We were riding with Elder and Sister Clark (Mission Mechanic and PCC vehicle clerk) and they took us to a Japanese temple that was beautiful. We got to ring a gong and walk the manicured gardens.

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.