Greetings from Laie, Hawaii on Sunday, July 17th!

Good evening from this little corner of paradise … except today ‘paradise’ is very muggy and not particularly comfortable. AC is definitely a blessing. I have a list of people I intend to personally thank for their service when I die and meet them in the world of spirits … and Willis Carrier is high on that list.

We’ve had another hectic and busy week, as seems to be usual. Two specific changes to our schedule contributed to that. We have seven apartments for sister missionaries and can have up to four sisters in each apartment. During the last transfer, which ended last evening, one of the apartments was empty. We have some new sisters arriving on Wednesday and now need that apartment. So, on Friday rather than working our normal morning shift at the Visitors’ Center, we took several of the sister missionaries with us and did a thorough cleaning of that apartment. What we kind of thought would take a couple of hours turned into six hours and we’ve still got about another hour’s worth of work to do. We’ll finish up the apartment tomorrow (Monday) afternoon as the sister missionaries will be moving in on Wednesday.

The Church’s Missionary Department has taken serious notice of how busy we’ve become at the Visitors’ Center and the fact that we’re definitely over loading the sister missionaries. They have very little time now available to work in their assigned proselyting areas, where they’re supposed to be spending time when not on shift at the Visitors’ Center. However, the additional tram and bus tours and the need to send more sister missionaries over to the PCC every afternoon has really impacted their ability to spend time in their assigned areas.

Our allowed complement of sister missionaries has been at 28 for a few years. We’ve been as high as 27 since we’ve been here and as low as 22. Right now we have 26 sister missionaries with three more arriving next Wednesday and two leaving at the same time. We received news last Friday that the Missionary Department has re-evaluated our needs and have increased our complement to 38 sister missionaries. It’ll take several months before we get to that level. This was very welcome news! After this coming Wednesday, the next transfer is at the end of August and we think we’ll start getting some of the additional missionaries then. But, that’ll also mean we need more apartments!

The Visitors’ Center Directors, Elder and Sister Swinton, are also in demand as speakers. This weekend they were asked by the Church to participate in a Stake Conference on the Big Island, so they flew down to Kona yesterday and are flying back tonight. What that meant is they weren’t available for their normal Sunday afternoon shift at the Visitors’ Center. Elder and Sister Andrus split their shift with Sister Smith and me today. We stayed an extra two hours this afternoon and the Andrus’s came back for the last two hours. That has given us another long day! There’s always plenty to do.

Perhaps I’ve also mentioned that the Polynesian Cultural Center has added a fourth Luau to their schedule. The three luaus they’ve had scheduled are selling out weeks in advance, so they figured out a way to put on two back-to-back luaus in the Hale Ohana Luau venue with the first one starting at 4pm and the second one starting at 6pm. The doors open at 3:30pm for the first luau and at 5:30pm for the second luau, with each luau lasting for 1 hour and fifteen minutes, about ten minutes shorter than they’ve been using for a luau. In the other luaus they start the program, then suspend the program for about ten minutes while folks go through the buffet lines to get their dinner and then resume the program. In the back-to-back system, there isn’t a break in the program.

We were assigned to be at the Hale Ohana last Friday and had an interesting time! There was a lot of confusion amongst the guests about what time they were supposed to be there. Some guests thought they’d booked the 6pm luau but when they picked up their tickets they were assigned to the 4pm luau because the 6pm was sold out by the time they picked up their tickets. That didn’t set well with a lot of people. There were many more small issues as well. We’re back at the Hale Ohana Luau in two weeks. Maybe they’ll have the kinks worked out by then!

In the coming weeks we’ll be doing the same kind of deep cleaning in each of the apartments that we did last Friday morning. This hasn’t been done for several years and as a result, all of the apartments have accumulated a lot of “treasures” that no one claims anymore. Sister Smith will go into an apartment, open a closet door, and ask, “Who belongs to this (thing)?” No one claims it. So they just close the door and forget about it. Meanwhile, they don’t have any storage space and have boxes of stuff strewn around the apartments. They’re going to be amazed at how much space is going to suddenly become available … and how clean the apartment can actually be. Meanwhile, we also use this as a way to teach them proper and efficient cleaning techniques.

Never a dull moment, it seems. The mainland Chinese visitor influx continues. The small change in the luaus by adding the fourth luau has definitely impacted our visitor counts on the Laie Tram Tours … that is, seriously increasing the number of guests. Yesterday we had an all-time record of 400 tram tour guests in one day. We’ve never been over 350 and have been around 300 in the past month or so. We clearly can use more sister missionaries, particularly including sisters who can speak Mandarin Chinese (a very valuable capability in the missionary world). We compete head-to-head with Temple Square for Asian-language-speaking missionaries. What I’ve been finding out is that most of our Chinese tour groups have either been to Temple Square earlier in their vacation or will be going to Temple Square sometime after leaving Hawaii. Last year Temple Square had a bit more than 60,000 Chinese-speaking visitors. We’re on course here to have 50,000 this year (on an annualized basis). Have your children / grand children learn Mandarin!!

Oh my, this has been a long letter! Thanks for hanging in for the whole thing. ’til next week! Attached is a panoramic view from the Polynesian Cultural Center as we were taking tickets last Friday afternoon.

Love,
father/father-in-law/brother/brother-in-law/uncle/cousin/son/grandpa/missionary/friend

Panorama from the Hale Ohana Lua at the Polynesian Cultural Center
Panorama from the Hale Ohana Lua at the Polynesian Cultural Center

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