September 20, 2015
Greetings from Laie!
While it doesn’t seem possible to us, we’ve now been in Laie six months. We arrived at the Honolulu Airport around 3pm on March 19th and Elder Jorgensen from the Mission Home drove us to Laie. We met Elder and Sister Rose (who we were replacing) in the driveway for about twenty minutes before they left to go to the airport to fly home and be released from their mission. That was the entire turnover! Fortunately Elder and Sister Priday (the Center Director and his wife) and Elder and Sister Jensen, the other senior missionary couple have been here to complete the education. Both of those couples finish their missions in January, which is only four months from now. The way time is going by, that’ll seem almost like tomorrow when they are leaving.
Speaking of leaving, four of the sister missionaries complete their missions this week and return home to be released and report their mission. All four of them have been outstanding missionaries and we’ll certainly miss them when they are gone. Two new missionaries arrive on Wednesday from the Missionary Training Center in Provo. With four leaving and two coming in, we’re going to be at 24 sister missionaries at the Center instead of 26.
What all that means is that this week is missionary transfers and Sister Smith and I are now on a different schedule. We’re at the Center on Monday and Tuesday afternoons, have Wednesday now as our Preparation Day, and are at the Center on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday mornings. Our Sunday schedule stays the same all year long — 9am – 11:30am at the Center followed by Church from noon until 3:00pm. Transfers happen every six weeks and the next one will be the week following Halloween.
The warmer-than-normal temperatures continue and even the locals are complaining! This has apparently been a very abnormal summer as far as the weather is concerned. The past couple of days the trade winds have picked up in the later afternoon making it more tolerable to be outside. The warmer-than-normal temperatures coupled with air conditioning issues at the Center means that every morning this past week has been stifling inside the Center. One of the compressor pumps has given up the ghost and replacement parts have been going to arrive “any day now”. I figure it’ll happen the day after the temperature breaks and we’re back to normal paradisiacal weather! Meanwhile, check out my blog for the latest on the flagpole and the flags we are now flying (https://www.rnsmith.com/).
The major non-event of the last week was a tsunami. There was a very serious earthquake last Wednesday in Chile (magnitude 8.3) which triggered a tsunami alert. A couple of hours later it was determined that the waves would be less than 1 meter (less than 3 feet) by the time they got to Hawaii in the early morning hours on Thursday. The first waves were forecast to arrive a few minutes after 3am. Unfortunately, someone at the Mission Office misunderstood the tsunami warning and thought that the waves were arriving at 3pm on Wednesday afternoon (that is, less than an hour). In a panic, he sent a text message to the Zone Leaders to get everyone to safety. His text was further misinterpreted by our zone leaders (both of whom are foreign nationals, one from Mongolia and the other from Tonga) as being a critical emergency and they sent emergency text messages to all of our sister missionaries with instructions contrary to what they’ve previously been given about what to do in case of serious flooding, earthquake, or a tsunami. Of course, that panicked all of the sister missionaries. It took Elder Priday a couple of hours to finally reach all of them and calm down their fears. The sister missionaries from Japan vividly remember the Tsunami that devastated the Fukushima Nuclear Reactors and the whole coastline north of Tokyo a few years ago. They were more than very concerned! As it was, when the tsunami waves finally arrived a little after 4am, they were recorded at Diamond Head as slightly more than two inches. I’ve no idea how one even measures a wave that small and determines that it is a tsunami wave versus any other kind of a wave.
We’re continuing to be in a lull with fairly low visitor counts. But we still do get quite a few visitors every day and it’s always fun to talk with them and, because the numbers are lower, we have more time available to talk with guests. We had a small tour group from Tahiti come in to the center … all French speaking. We don’t have a French-speaking missionary, other than someone remembered that one of the new sisters who arrived last transfer could speak a little French from a couple of college classes. She was located and pressed into service. It turned out she could do fairly well in French! The group left taking a Book of Mormon, which is the only information we have in the Center in French. We don’t get very many French-speaking guests, for some reason.
The latest new country this week was Latvia, a very small country in the northern part of eastern Europe. A fellow from Latvia with his girlfriend from Poland stopped in as they were driving around the Island. He had left Latvia during the collapse of the USSR and went to Ireland to work (and where he learned English). A few years later he figured out he could make more money back in Latvia than he could in Ireland so he moved back home and met his girlfriend. Everyone has a story and it’s nice to have some time to hear some of these stories.
Things are going very well for us over here. We appreciate hearing from you (and of course would happily hear more from you!). We’ve now got to set our minds to the task of learning which missionaries are in which companionship and what apartment they are now living in. On Wednesday every missionary moves and only one companionship stays together (but in a different location). Remembering who is with whom and where they live is quite a task for our old brain cells!
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