November 27, 2014

November 27, 2014

We are celebrating a non-Holiday day today by not going to the office today.  However, Steve went to play at the shop, imagine that after working here on the computer for 3-4 hours following up on business and etc.  I fed the missionaries this morning and last night, so it feels like I have been chained to the kitchen for 2 days, have cooked enough food for an army, have just about given most of it away, except for the chicken enchiladas that we decided to keep for leftovers. Because Thanksgiving is a non-holiday for Tonga, the missionaries will celebrate with a feast on Friday at 5 with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.  Everybody contributes ‘good food’, we will have a feast, eat too much, visit and then at 7, our ward will have its primary Christmas party, which we need to attend.  I am participating in the program, playing for the kids and possibly for the ward for the numbers they will sing during the program.  The missionaries were also going to watch “Frozen” which we’ve seen before.  However, I would like to see it again since we had technical difficulties with the sound, so we missed some of it.  Oh well, we will do what we can.  I am supposed to make pies and take a vegetable plate tomorrow.  Since we don’t have a car, sharing with the Holbrook’s who have family here, we aren’t going to get the needed groceries until tomorrow.  Sure hope I can find some lard for the pie crust.  If not, I punt.

I know I keep saying that time flies, but I am amazed that several weeks have passed since I wrote my last report.  Too much has happened again, so I think I will just start with what really stands out in my mind, besides nothing, right now.  We have been working hard on developing the  5 year plan for the ‘donor’, have hit a few snags and stumps in the road, however, we are getting a better, clearer idea of what needs to happen in the next few years.  Wish we had known a year ago what we know now.  Hindsight is always pretty good.  We have each teachers input according to what they would like to see happen in their programs.  The details are the hard part, plus there are many things we have no control of which includes the facilities.  We have some really great teachers, some not so good, some who have retired who should have and those that aren’t retiring who should..  Then Tonga has a way of just moving teachers around to teach classes that they have no experience in, so that means learning a new trade on the part of the teachers in addition to the students.  The pre-registration was confusing to many students so we are pretty sure that there will be changes again in the class sizes, but hopefully not the mess that there was last year.  The class loads in some of the classes are totally unmanageable, especially the cooking classes.  Too many students sign up for cooking because they think all they will get to do is eat.  These are probably the kids who go to school without meals and money to buy food.  So it’s time to weed out the eaters only and get those who really want to learn to cook.  I’m not sure how that is going to happen though.  Surprisingly, there are quite a few young men who are really interested in fashion design and who are good in the design process.  And not all of them are ‘cute’ as Steve reports.  The hard trade classes are pretty much full, art is going to need a 2^nd teacher.  Moeake(Mo e ah ke) is in the middle of changing some of his curriculum to add wood art, and some other specialty stuff.  He got some new equipment that Steve has been showing him how to use.  At one time, Steve had 4 teachers with him when he was showing them how to use the scroll saw, the lathe’s and we get to put together an industrial sewing machine to use to make the tapa cloth frames and etc. for the art classes.  Moeaki is a very quiet reserved guy, so he doesn’t say much unless he really has something to talk about.  But by the look on his face, you can see the cogs turning with new ideas for projects.  Spencer and Viliami are also like little kids when they see some of the stuff that can be done on the lathe.  Unfortunately for all of the guys, we had meetings last week in the middle of the week that we were unaware of, but asked to participate in.  So, Steve has missed this week working with these 4 teachers.  We got hold of Spencer and Viliami, so the plan is to ‘play’ next week.

Graduation was different this year because we had an idea what was happening.  However, we didn’t plan on being the leaders of the grand march for the graduates.  We were asked to march with the graduates because we were also leaving this next year.  I think they just think they have to keep us busy.  I was pretty amazed at how well organized the graduation was, how different it was from the one in Seineha.  Bruce Yerman spoke at both exercises, but the placement of the awards and the speaker were different.  Plus the mood of the crowd at Liahona was more respectful.  Liahona, graduated 154 form 7 students, while Saineha had 49.  Both gyms were decorated nicely; Saineha was more creative with their decorations.  Liahona’s program was more organized.  There was a difficulty though with the “Dux” at Liahona.  There were 4 high honor roll students, and apparently, the second runner up, did not like her placement and ended up walking out of graduation.  We heard some commotion after she left, but we don’t know what really happened other than security had to be called.  I felt bad for the girl who became the ‘Dux’ because she gave an excellent talk, well prepared, memorized and executed flawlessly.  Lavenia, the principal at Havelu middle school, told us that this young lady was the ‘dux’ at her school when she graduated from middle school.  This young lady’s dad died this year in the states, while she was attending school here in Tonga.  Mom had just left to be with her husband when she found out he was not doing well, but didn’t make it in time.  Apparently he had been really ill when he went to the states, but wanted his daughter to stay in school, knowing that she might want to go to the states for his funeral.  She was a pretty gutsy young lady.  The graduation had all of the usual fanfare at the end of the graduation.  However, this year, we got piled up with leis of candy.  Too bad for me who loves chocolate, I’m wearing it now.

The weather is hot now.  Temperatures are in the 80’s with 70-80% humidity so it feels like it’s in the 90’s.  We finally turned on our air conditioning today after I finally decided that I was going to have to strip off my clothes if I was going to survive.  That’s a pretty scarey thought, but I have spent the last 2 days cooking and I am not kidding about being too hot.  When sweat runs off my face doing nothing, I am a little overheated.  The lawns here are brown because of the lack of rainfall.  We also got a notice this week from the weather people from somewhere that are predicting at least 2 cyclones to hit the area during the months of November to April because of the lack of rain and change in weather patterns.  We aren’t quite sure how to prepare other than have plenty of food and water on hand.  We keep praying for rain, we get some but not enough to do any good.  The crops are getting yellow, brown, and very droopy.  This people have to have their crops or they starve.  There is no such thing as a reserve, although the leaders of the churches are stressing food storage, etc.  This is a hand to mouth civilization.  However, they are very resilient, are used to going without.  We’ll see what happens.  The breezes have changed from cool to hot now, so they are certainly drying out things worse.  I am grateful for clouds in the sky that cover up the hot sun.

Because school is out, we don’t have 8 am meetings.  So our schedule has changed.  We can now do our walking in the morning, except on the days we decide to walk at night.  Then there are days that we don’t walk, we don’t go to the office, but we work at home.  We worked one morning at home until about noon, then went to the office and worked until 8pm.  Needless to say, we were tired the next day, but so far, we’ve still managed to work many hours.  We are so grateful for the experiences that we are having.

We are finding we have to rely on our faith more, like the Tongans do.  We had an incident that happened right after Cyndee and Margaret left.  Steve had worked to get all of our pictures moved to our external hard drive so that if something happened to our computer again, we would still have our pictures since we keep the hard drive with us all of the time.  In moving the pictures from the computer to the hard drive, instead of copying the pictures to the hard drive, Steve actually moved them, which means they were then removed from the computer.  When Steve realized what he had done, he was going to just copy them back when he had time, the next day.  During that time, before he could recapture the pictures, the hard drive came up missing from his desk at the TVET office.  When he realized that it was gone, we scoured both the office and home, looking for the hard drive.  We couldn’t find it, we were sick, we felt violated because we keep our office locked.  He looked all over the computer to see if he could find them somewhere in the computer, but no luck.  We have cried big tears, prayed a lot, cussed and then given up finding the hard drive. We had the IT people check our computer to see if the missing pictures could be recaptured, which they thought could happen, but they didn’t have the right program to recapture.   Steve contacted Blake to see what he thought we needed to do.  We talked to the FM manager, Ennismore, but no luck.  Steve was just going through the steps Blake had given him before trying to download a new program. However, during the next day or so, when Steve was working on the pictures for his blog, a folder popped up entitled,  ‘Nuku’alofa Tonga Mission’ pictures.  All of the missing pictures were inside the folder. Steve yelled ‘hey, you’ve got to come see this’,  quickly told me to come look, and when I saw what he was looking at, all I could do was cry.  We had our tender mercy.  So we have our pictures back again, and we have another witness to the power of prayer.  Even though we had given up, our faith was weak but Heavenly Father knew how important those 5459 pictures were to us, beginning of our mission to now.  As we looked back through the pictures, we had already forgotten some of the events that we have participated in, or the people that we work with.

Sometimes we get blessed with little acts of kindness that just come our way.  When we finished teaching the music lessons in the north stake, we were asked by someone to come to the stake president’ office when we were finished.  We weren’t quite sure what to think about that, but we went.  When we got there, we were presented with a light lunch by the wives of the stake presidency and given many thanks for teaching their young people.  Now I have to say that I have really given up on any one of them really being able to play a hymn about half way through the lessons.  On the fifth week, I couldn’t believe my ears, there was actually music being played that was recognizable as a hymn.  From then until we finished with that group, there was some amazing progress made.  Out of the 28 that we started with 10 completed the course, and about 5 of them seemed to finally understand what we had been teaching.  Sister Wood and I were then presented a Tongan piece of art that was done by the art teacher, Tevita who had retired from Liahona the year previous and who is a member of the stake presidency.  Tevita had done pictures made from tapa cloth, with 3d effects of a grand piano with a student sitting on the piano bench surrounded by the ocean, beach and palm trees.  What a treat and what a nice surprise.  All we could do was thank them for their many kindnesses.  I suppose I will have to get back to piano lessons after the holidays or school starts. We will see what happens with schedules.

The Senior missionaries are currently preparing some Christmas music to be recorded at the local TV station for next week.  We have some pretty good talent, with hardly any of the men who can read music.  Sister Hamblin is really working with the men and I think they are sounding very good.  They all work really hard, they are just untrained, but determined to do a good job.  We have also volunteered our music to Prince Ata to have a musical fireside for his family.  The spirit of the Lord is really working on Prince Ata’s family as is the power of the adversary.  It is really interesting to see what events are taking place in Tonga to prepare the way for a change.