Greetings from Laie! It’s a beautiful day here (as most of them are) and we’re on a bit of a different schedule for today only. Normally we go to Church from 8am to 11am, do a quick stop at home for Sister Smith to change into her muu-muu, and go to the Visitors’ Center by 11:30am. Then at 4pm Elder and Sister Swinton, the VC Directors, relieve us and were finished with the VC for the day.
However, Elder and Sister Swinton are speaking at a fireside this evening, so they’ve traded shifts with us. They’re doing the 11:30am to 4pm shift and we’ll take the 4pm to 8pm shift this evening. At this time of the year (that is, the time of the year that isn’t summer vacation) Sunday is our busiest day. We’ll have very few visitors (less than 75) between 9am and 11:30am. Starting about 11am the visitor counts pick up and peak around 4 in the afternoon. We usually have to remind people that we’re closing as we come up on 8pm on Sunday evening and the result is usually around 550 – 600 visitors for the day. Most of them are members of the Church who like to spend a good part of their Sunday afternoon at the Laie Temple grounds and the Visitors’ Center and many of them are locals (not tourists) who treat the Visitors’ Center a s kind of a community center on Sunday. Whatever the reason, we enjoy having them at the Center!
Yesterday was Commencement for the winter term graduating class at BYU-Hawaii. That also brings a number of visitors from the mainland and from Asia who are here for the graduation of a child, sibling, or grandchild. We’ll have quite a few of those visitors at the Visitors’ Center this afternoon.
Today is exactly 11 1/2 months since we went into the MTC to begin our mission service. Sometime in about 11 1/2 months we’ll be released. As the weeks now go by, we’ll have fewer weeks yet to serve than we’ve already served. We just seem to have gotten here….
We’ve had another busy week with plenty to do when we weren’t at the Visitors’ Center. Our P-day included a trip to Honolulu to get my sleep apnea CPAP machine reprogrammed as a result of the sleep study done a few weeks ago. We then did some much needed shopping, including picking up a floor lamp that will replace a desk lamp that’s in the way of the second monitor for my computer. Except when we got home and I opened the box, the glass bowl for the light was broken. I’ll have to take it back for a return sometime this coming week. We volunteered last Monday at the Polynesian Cultural Center at the Ohana Luau for a delightful couple of hours followed by the free dinner at Prime Dining. We have a new sister missionary arriving on Monday morning who needs a bed, so Sister Smith and I pulled one out of storage and put it together for her … something that should have been trivial but definitely was not! The job is done, however, and she has a place to sleep!
This missionary is coming from South Korea. For some reason she was having visa problems (highly unusual for missionaries coming from Korea) and has spent the first almost three months of her mission serving in one of the South Korean missions waiting for her visa to get approved. That has finally happened so she’s on her way here on Monday. This week is also the last week of the transfer, so for this week she’ll be in a trio with two other sisters missionaries and then into a normal companionship next week (and then we’ll take the bed down and put it back into storage). We’re quite happy to have her here! We definitely can use another Korean-speaking missionary!
We’d love to be able to have a Korean, a Japanese, a Cantonese, and a Chinese speaking missionary on the morning shift and another set on the afternoon shift plus being able to have English along with other Asian language on each of the trams in the afternoon. Since we aren’t blessed with that many foreign missionaries, we do the best we can.
The sea has been quite spectacular this past week. I put a video up on YouTube from last Monday
and then the waves got even bigger as the week went along. I’ve taken some additional video on Thursday afternoon and need to put that up on YouTube as well as it shows quite dramatically how powerful these waves really are. A major surfing competition (The Eddie) was held last Thursday when the waves were quite spectacular … the winning guy rode a 60 foot wave and managed not to get wiped out or killed. We were able to watch the early part of the competition on our iPhones before we had to leave and were quite amazed at the intestinal fortitude of those guys. I’m certain one qualification is to be completely nuts!
The coming week will be equally as busy as last week; we never lack for plenty to do. That’ll include attempting to answer the perennial question: “who do you know to get a mission call to Hawaii?” or the statement, “this isn’t a mission … it’s a vacation!”. While it’s true that we’re here in a delightfully beautiful place to live, but the operative word is missionary WORK. I don’t think I ever was this busy when I was being paid as I do now while paying for the opportunity. We love you all and you’re always in our prayers!
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