Anxiously Engaged in Kiribati

 We are still working to get the wheelchairs out of port.  Seriously! Their system leaves much to be desired. We are lucky that we have a very influential person as a member of parliament.  She has actually hired someone just to help people get their stuff out of port.  Yes, it's that bad.  But good news: the wheelchairs will be delivered to the hospital on Monday.   Moroni High School had a visiting teacher/senior missionary come with a new curriculum for their carpentry part in their vocational/trade section.  He brought with him new equipment like table saw, drill press, etc.  He has already implemented this program into two of the church schools here in the pacific and will do a third school in a couple of months. He suggested we look into getting the equipment for a government school here. So we met with King George the Fifth High School's principal.  He had already got the curriculum passed through the education ministry and can pr...

 What a privilege it was to be a part of the temple ground breaking here in Kiribati!  We spent most of the day before helping to set up. The senior missionaries were assigned to be ushers, so we were able to be there in person. Most of the young missionaries and other members of the church  watched from the chapels.  There were 3 local speakers: primary age, youth age and a young single adult. They did an amazing job. Then the President of Kiribati spoke. He is not a member of our faith, but he spoke about his visit to Utah and his visit with President Nelson.  He asked for 3 things: (1) A university to help with the education of Kiribati, (2) a temple to be built in Kiribati, (3) a priesthood blessing.  He got 2/3 of his requests.  He spoke about how the temple would be a blessing to his people and about what a spiritual experience the priesthood blessing was.  I later heard that his daughter and her family have already converted to the church. ...

 We have been without power a lot lately. It gets uncomfortably warm, but we are still able to do our work. I see the Lord's hand in this work everyday.  I am truly learning to trust in His help.  When we started this mission, our theme scripture was: Acts 9:6  "Lord, what would thou have me to do?"   Wow, we couldn't have been more right. Every day we pray for guidance on what we should do for our current projects and who needs our help for future projects.  It isn't easy. We run into a lot of walls.  I start to get discourage and think "Ugh!  this will never happen".  But we just keep moving (Keith is way better at this than I am) and eventually we end up exactly where we should be. Many of our projects are moving from the development stage to the approved stage, to the implementation stage.   There's one project that I'm really excited about, we call it: Clean up Kiribati. It started when Elder Jaggi asked for a project that...

 These past 2 weeks have been crazy busy.  First, Uraia (a paid employee by the church who is a manager of humanitarian projects in the Pacific - and our boss) visits us from Fiji.  He stays 4 days here in Tarawa.  It was great having him here. So nice to have that kind of support!  Then 4 days after he leaves, Elder and Sister Lewis arrive.  They are  Area Welfare Specialists. He is a ICU doctor and a director of a medical school. She is a nurse and a professor of nursing. Both are very impressive people. They work with all health related humanitarian projects in the Pacific area.  This was their first time to Kiribati.  They are such kind, loving people.  Sister Lewis emailed us before coming and said "We have a Costco here in Auckland.  Do you need anything?"  My first response was to say no, but then I started thinking.  We could use some more vitamins.  The food here is very expensive and fairly low quality....

 Three of our projects were approved for funding this past week! (Yeah! It's "happy dance" time) Project CURE, the school of nursing computer network, and the eye clinic were approved by the area presidency. They are smaller amount projects so they don't need to go to SLC. We are still waiting for our emergency response project to be approved. It usually takes only 2 days to get approval and it has now been 3-4 weeks. I think it's lost somewhere.  I keep asking about it, and our "boss" keeps telling me to be patient, it's at the area presidency. I just feel bad because these families are needing help now. The good news is that when you don't have much, and you lose it all, you haven't lost much.  The Kiribati people are a very resilient people and are already rebuilding their lives.     We have 4 more projects we are working on. One is to build an accessible toilet for the Community for the Disabled  .  We met with them today. I love the work...

 It happened again today. When we need to talk to someone specific and they just happen to walk by right when we needed them.  This happens at least once a week.  Let me give you just a few recent examples. Today we walked to the hospital to speak to Grace who is our contact person to get the road put in.  It started to rain so we slipped under a transport stop and waited for the rain to stop. When we got there, Grace said we needed to get the Secretary to the Ministry of Health (Head Honch) to "sign off" on it. Today was the only day the secretary would be in town. So we walked up to her office to make an appointment, thinking it will take at least a week or two to get in to see her, and there she is coming out of another meeting . She welcomes us into her office and long story short, the road project will go out for tender today!  If it had not rained we would have missed her and the project would be delayed yet again. We are trying to make this year's budget ...

 We took an entire day and spent it with the other senior missionaries touring the island and seeing all the WWII artifacts. In 1942, Japan took occupation of Tarawa. Then in November 1943, the USA attacked and took back the island. It was called the Battle of Tarawa and there have been many books and movies made about this 3 day battle. Many, many lives were lost there. We enjoyed learning more about the history of Tarawa, but the best part of the day was being in the companionship of the other senior missionaries. They are such good people.  We love them all.  Please forgive the photo dump. But so cool!! Memorials:  the one on the left is to the Japanese soldiers  and the one on the right is to their Korean slaves Lunch with the senior missionaries.  Within the last couple of weeks we had 2 separate home fires. In the first home fire, 2 homes were completely destroyed. They had thatched roofs and wood walls. Luckily, no one was hurt. A couple of  you...