Mission Letter: Reporting From Laie, Hawaii on Monday, November 30, 2015

November 30, 2015

Greetings all! Now if I can just remember to say “rabbit rabbit” tomorrow morning…. My rememberer is sometimes a bit faulty! Like, I didn’t remember that I hadn’t written my weekly epistle until we were in Family Home Evening! Each Monday evening all of the senior missionaries here (close to 90 of us) who can, get together at the Heber J. Grant Building at 7:15 pm for a Family Home Evening. This is the transfer where we have Monday evenings free and can go to FHE. From the middle of December through the end of January we’ll be on the evening shift on Mondays and won’t be able to go.

Tonight’s featured speakers were President John Tanner and his wife, President of BYU-Hawaii. They presented a wonderful Christmas message and talked quite a bit about his vision and feelings for the University. He is newly installed as President, inaugurated in this past November.

We’ve just finished up a very busy and interesting week. The Visitors’ Center was closed on Thanksgiving Day, one of two days of the year the Center is closed. Junior AhYou, owner of Tita’s Grill (a very popular fast-food place) has for the past five or six years, gathered all of the senior missionaries as well as anyone who might not have a Thanksgiving meal for quite a Thanksgiving feast! I wrote about it on my blog, so rather than repeat here I’ll just refer you to the blog entry: https://www.rnsmith.com/?p=3624.

Saturday was one of the busiest days for guests at the Visitors’ Center in several months. We had the afternoon shift on Saturday and vacationing guests came to the Center in droves. We talked with a lot of people and I took a couple-hundred photos for people. It’s pretty dark by 6 pm this time of the year, so flash in definitely required. Most people use their cell phones as a camera and some of those cell phones have very poor flash, if they have flash at all. I think I’ve handled every make and model of cell phones and tablets there are. For some reason, lots of Chinese use their Apple iPad for their camera. It looks kind of funny holding up an iPad to try and take a picture!

Overall, even with Thanksgiving being closed, we had 3,162 visitors for the week in the Center, more than a thousand more than the previous week.

Our Preparation Day was also on Thursday, so we did the preparation day things earlier in the week, like laundry, house cleaning, and shopping.

Sunday evening we had the first of our Christmas firesides, a sister missionary musical fireside. We have some very talented sister missionaries here and the program was very well received. We had a standing room only … spilling out the doors … crowd for the fireside. While the Center is scheduled to close at 8pm, after a fireside like this we’re lucky to be closed by 9pm as everyone wants to visit and “talk story”.

“Talk Story” is Hawaiian pidgen English for “shooting the breeze”. I hear this phrase all the time. There are quite a few of these pidgen phrases here in Hawaii that have their roots in the early Chinese and Japanese immigrants who came over as farm laborers, struggling to communicate with the Hawaiians and the English speakers. To bridge the gap, they invented these pidgen English phrases that are now common in the local language. I think that “talk story” is a very descriptive phrase.

Christmas is upon us. We even have a Christmas Tree set up. Four sister missionaries came over after the fireside on Sunday and helped decorate the tree. That’s also a story on my blog … check there for the details!

Well, I’m done for the day that started at 5:30am this morning and just turned 10pm tonight. Merry Christmas!

Our Christmas Tree
Our Christmas Tree

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