Aloha! That’s the all-encompassing greeting that one hears everywhere in Hawaii. One interesting tradition at Church is that when a speaker begins, the speaker first greets the audience with a hearty “Aloha!” and the congregation echoes back, “Aloha!”. Sometimes if the speaker is from Samoa, they’ll use the Samoan greeting: “Talofa!”
The practice originated well over a hundred years ago when a visiting authority stood up to speak in a Church meeting, took out a handkerchief and said that he wanted to take the greetings from the members back with him. He put the handkerchief on the podium, greeted them with “Aloha!”, and after the congregation responded, he carefully folded up the handkerchief and put it in his pocket to take back. It’s become a tradition every since to start a speech with “Aloha!”.
I think we’ve had the busiest day ever today at the Visitors’ Center! We came on duty at 11:30am after going to our Church meetings and were there until 4:00 pm. We had hundreds of people come into the Center! Most of them, by far, were from Utah. Spring Break season has started. It’s also been a colder and snowier than normal winter in Utah and everyone seems to be flocking to Hawaii to warm up and hit the beaches. The schools throughout southern Utah are having Spring Break this week and the northern counties are coming up in another week or so. We were definitely tired at the end of our shift today!
It was also Fast Sunday, so we’ve been to the break-the-fast pot-luck dinner and waddled back out. Very good food available there … and plenty of it. Our assignment tonight was a main dish for a dozen people. The chicken – spaghetti casserole from Sister Smith was quite tasty and I’ve some left over for lunches this week.
Our time here on the mission is divided up into six-week periods called “transfers”. This six-week transfer ended last Saturday and many of the sister missionaries will change companions and apartments on Wednesday. Two brand new missionaries are arriving from the Mission Training Center in Provo. No missionaries are going home. The net effect is that we’ll go up from twenty sister missionaries here to twenty-five sister missionaries. Getting two more companionships will be greatly appreciated … particularly now that the number of guests is climbing.
We’ve had a very normal week as far as our work assignments are concerned, well except for last Monday. A Korean sister missionary has been waiting for several months for her visa to come through and that finally happened. She’s been serving her mission in one of the South Korean missions while waiting for her visa to come through. (Our daughter Dawnmarie was called to France on her mission, but after going to the MTC she went to California for several weeks waiting for her visa to France to be approved. This happens fairly often. We have another missionary from the Philippines stuck there waiting for her visa. Some day that’ll go through and she’ll be on her way to Laie.) So, last Monday morning Sister Smith and I drove to Honolulu to pick up Sister Chio and bring her to the Center to begin her real mission. Normally we would have worked at the Visitors’ Center from 9-2:30 on Monday, but swapped shifts with the other senior missionary couple so we could go down to Honolulu and back and then work the 2:30- 8:00pm shift.
When I write next week’s letter we’ll have visitors here! Jared and Tania are flying over on the 11th for about ten days. We’re beyond ecstatic to have them come over!!
We’re on the downhill side of our mission. It doesn’t seem possible! We’ve pretty well settled into our routines here! Today Sister Smith asked me what we were going to do with all our time when we get home from our mission. It’s too soon, for me at least, to begin thinking about that!
I hope you have a great week! Elder James Smith, enjoy your time at the MTC. It will be a fabulous time for you! Starting next week you’ll get this email at your new Mission Email: james.r.smith@myldsmail.net.
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