August 23, 2015
Greetings from a very muggy Laie! We’ve had two days of thunderstorms. Quite unprecedented. According to the Weather Service the Island of Oahu gets on the average 6 thunderstorms a year. So far we’ve had two, so I guess there are a few more to come. These storms have been accompanied by torrential downpours as well with localized flash flooding. Our elevation at our house is about 140 feet above sea level with some pretty tall mountains behind us. There are some very large ditches and canals running through this area which are usually very dry. Not lately! One web site I saw said the Hawaii gets twice as much rainfall as the total water usage for everything on the islands. So, most of it must run off into the ocean somehow. I just know that there is no shortage of water here and no ever talks about water conservation.
The most distant visitors to the Visitors’ Center this week came from Sri Lanka and Nepal. The couple from Nepal were very interested in the Church as they had seen the Meet the Mormons movie which featured a fairly well know man in Nepal who is a member of the Church. They filled out a referral card and asked for more information when they got back home from their vacation.
I talked to several people today from Utah who were flying home this afternoon or this evening because school starts tomorrow. One family (the mother had grown up here in this area) were flying directly back to Salt Lake City this evening and were dropping three kids off at school on their way home from the airport. That’s pushing the vacation right to the limit, I think. Hope the kids get some sleep in the airplane! The time difference between Honolulu and Salt Lake City is four hours. When it’s 8 am in Salt Lake City, it is 4 am here in Laie. These kids are going to be dealing with some decent jet lag as they try to stay awake on the first day of school. At my age, I don’t think that would be “fun”!
Our week was quite normal this past week. On Preparation Day (Thursday) we stayed home and just did stuff around the house, or at least that’s what I did. Sister Smith together with the Visitors’ Center Director’s wife Sister Priday worked their way through two of the sister missionary apartments. Over here the missionary slang for the apartments is “pads”. They cleaned out a mountain of stuff from these two pads and will be doing a couple more in the coming week. As missionaries transfer in and out of these pads, stuff just accumulates. Other stuff disappears and suddenly there’s no forks, or no glasses, or whatever. So part of this activity is to get each of the pads back to the basic set of things that should be in the apartment.
On the bedbug front, I think the action taken by the landlord seems to be winning the battle. Their person has gone back to do a second round of cleaning, vacuuming, and spraying and I haven’t heard any more reports of bites. Meanwhile, to keep the bugs from spreading, the missionary exchanges have been put on hold for the time being. The thirteen sets of sister missionaries are divided into two districts. Each district has one set of sister missionaries designated as “trainers”. That set exchanges periodically with each other set of sister missionaries in that district for a full 24 hour day. The exchanges have been limited until the bedbug problem is resolved.
Next Sunday evening we’ll be hosting a Missionary Musical Fireside at the Center. We do one of these every three months where we showcase the sister missionaries and their musical talent. Right now there’s a lot of practicing going on for the missionaries to get ready. Last time I played the piano for one group number. At the moment I don’t have an assignment this time which means that I can enjoy the fireside! On a related note, President Uchtdorf from the First Presidency will be here on Saturday morning for a dedication service at the new marketplace at the Polynesian Cultural Center. We plan to be there!
While the fountains are running, lots of small issues are still being worked. The mechanism that regulates the amount of water in the pool isn’t working right, so people are trying to do that manually. The result is that there is too much water in the pool and the fountains don’t go nearly as high as we’d like them. Also, the automated system to turn the fountains on in the morning, off at night, and turn the lights in the pool on in the early evening and off later isn’t working correctly either (it kind of seems like what happens with babies that get their days and nights mixed…). No new word, either, on the flagpole. We still not allowed to put a flag up on it, so the un-straight pole must still be in discussion. The Director told us that he expected we’ll get new carpet at the Center before the end of the year. Knowing how things work here in Hawaii, I’m pretty sure he deliberately wasn’t specific on which year.
We have two shifts at the Center. The first is from 9am until 2:30pm and during this transfer that’s our shift on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesdays. On these days we get to the Center about 8:40am, open the door and disarm the (often non-functional) alarm system. We then turn on all the lights and get all of the electronics up and running. We have a prayer meeting with the sister missionaries who are assigned that morning at 8:55am and unlock the doors at 9am. Occasionally we have people waiting for the doors to be opened, but not too often. During the morning we get either walk-in visitors, many of whom were driving around, saw the Temple, and stopped to see what the building is all about. Many are members of the Church over here on vacation and have planned to spend a bit of time at the Center. We also get tour busses of visitors. Some pull up long enough for people to take a picture and leave right away. Others stop for as long as ten or fifteen minutes and advertise it as a “good bathroom stop”. The Asians generally come to Hawaii in tour groups, so we’ll get a bus load of people from Korea, or Japan, or China, or occasionally Australia. Those go pretty well when we have a sister missionary that speaks the language. If not, they come in, look quickly around, and leave. During the summer months we average around 200 people each day during the morning shift.
Since the sister missionaries have their Preparation Day on Monday (for one district) or on Tuesday (for the other district) and we need more missionaries in the afternoon than in the morning, on Monday and Tuesday mornings our staffing at the Center consists of Elder and Sister Smith (that’s us) and one set of sister missionaries. Between us we handle the all the visitors. On Wednesday, though, we have six sets of missionaries for the morning. Fortunately, Monday and Tuesday are slower days so everything kind of evens out.
Well, I’ve rambled on long enough, I think. If you’ve read this far, thanks for hanging in there! We’re having a good time and are really enjoying or missionary experience! We pray for you all daily and dearly love you!
Aloha!
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