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Well Done! Thou good and faithful servant(s)

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  A Kiribati flag with all missionaries names on it This week we said "Good-Bye" to our mission leaders, President and Sister Kendall.  What inspiring leaders they are.  They are over the Marshall Islands and Kiribati.  2 differnt countries, 2 different native languages, 2 different currencies, really - 2 different missions .  They are loved and will be sorely missed.  We had a farewell dinner with all the senior couples. The members of the church held a celebration in their honor at Moroni High School.  Lots of dancing and food.   The young proselyting Elders and Sister waiting  for the celebration to begin.  Mission rules: they had to leave at 9:00pm whether the  celebration is over or not.  They were obedient and left on  time after singing "Army of Helaman"  President and Sister Kendal dancing.   Honored Guest always dance as part of the celebration.   Silliness is alway encouraged because...
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Micro projects

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 Every year Moroni High School (MHS) replaces all their old CPU's (computers). Sometimes there are only 3-4 and other times there could be 15.  They donate these CPU's to the local High Schools here.  Last year they had 8 and were able to donate the monitors to go with them, but alas, they had no cables to attach the CPU's to the monitors.  Our supervisor, Uraia, who lives in Fiji, was able to find some extra cables and bring them to us.  This year Moroni had 15 CPU's but had no monitors or cables.  Uraia suggested we submit a "micro project"  which would allow us to get small things such as monitors without going through the whole project process each time.  Who knew we could do that?!!  So far we have bought 4 monitors and cables to give to Betio Junior Secondary School. They are not "ready to receive them yet", so we will wait to deliver them.  However, we have also been able to buy a water pump for the School of Nursing who had no wa...
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Hospital Road Ground Breaking

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  traditional dancers During our first week on Tarawa we were introduced to Secretary Benny of the Ministry of Health.  One of the projects we talked about was replacing the dirt road on the hospital campus with a cement road.  Plans had already been drawn up and approved. It has been a year since then and we finally had the ground breaking ceremony to start this construction.  It will be such a blessing to everyone.  Not only will it improve the cleanliness of the hospital by keeping down the dust clouds and mud, but driving on it was like driving on moguls on a black diamond hill.  It was a real life 4-wheeling experience in a Toyota Rush.  So glad this project is finally off the ground.  I hope they finish the road before we go home.   Set up for ground breaking The President of Kiribati arriving - what an honor! More traditional dancers Elder Tune (Area Seventy) speaking ground breaking by the eldest member of the community Keith and...
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 We have another boat project from a different North Tarawa islet, Anatoa.  Yes, it is a copy cat project. However, it can still do the same amount of good as the first one. And we knew this would happen.  This one was harder to put together just because of the personality and skill set of the senior missionary who was requesting the boat.  I sent him home to revise his plan for "sustainability" several times.  But once he got the entire community involved, it came together beautifully.  We submitted it and the committee wanted an evaluation of the first boat project before they recommended approval for the second project.  That's very fair.  We, as project managers, cannot do the evaluation, so Uraia came from Fiji to Nabeina to do the evaluation.  He found that their original plan for maintaining the boat didn't work out so well, so they changed it and now it is working quite well.  It has really improved the living conditions of the v...
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