August 29, 2011

Today started off in an odd way. About 4:15 this morning turned on the bedroom light. I sat up and asked what the problem was and she said it was after 8am. Then she looked at her watch and said, “No, it’s not, it’s 4:15”. She happily turned off the light and we went back to bed. Ironically, for the first time in memory since we started our mission, I had inadvertently set the alarm clock for 6:30 pm! At 7:15 am I awoke with a start to the phone ringing. I picked it up and it was Elder Anderson, a senior missionary working in the temple. He apologized as he was trying to call President Wooley (our temple president) and he inadvertently called me instead. I told Jan that maybe I should add this example as a way that the Holy Ghost can communicate with us. That is, prompt someone to call us when they didn’t need to in order to get us moving . I got up quickly and hurried into the den. I had been worrying during the night about getting seat assignments for our flights. I got on line to get seat assignments for our trip tomorrow and got worried in that they showed not seats available on the leg from Nadi to Port Vila in Vanuatu. I then tried to get seat assignments for our trip to New Caledonia in three weeks and the internet site wouldn’t even recognize our booking number! I was worried that the tickets weren’t good since the assistants had bought those tickets at a time when we started having trouble with hitting credit limits on the Church credit cards and I was concerned that perhaps they thought they had bought the tickets but the airline may have bumped us off after trying to get paid and having the credit limit kick in. This was definitely not a good morning.

I hurried to get cleaned up before the housekeeper came to help clean. She always comes at 8 sharp on Mondays and Fridays. I slammed down a bowl of cereal after she came and got into the office around 8:15. I had interviews starting at 8:30 and new the rest of the day was going to be dodgy at best since we have 57 people coming from the Taveuni district to attend the temple this week. Since they are from a district, I am the only person who can sign their temple recommends as their “Stake President”. Consequently, only those who already have recommends that are not expired weren’t going to need to see me. I got the message to the assistants (today is p-day so they normally don’t come into the office) that I was in an emergency situation and needed them to help me figure out our seating issues at least for the flight tomorrow and also figure out if we even have tickets for New Caledonia.

The day was very full and quite hectic at times as I interviewed many members for first time temple recommends. Some spoke Fijian and didn’t understand English very well. I didn’t have a Fijian speaker there to help with translation so I had them read the temple recommend question in Fijian as I asked it to them in English. We then had a large group of saints from Rabi. This island is made up of almost all people from Kiribati and they don’t even speak Fijian. I didn’t have the temple recommend questions in their language and I learned later that it probably wouldn’t have helped much since most of them don’t read very well. Fortunately there was a young college girl who was from Kiribati and who is a member of the Church. She sat in on the interviews and translated for me. I also had a few patriarchal blessing interviews and some limited use recommend interviews for youth who were to be sealed to parents. Between 8:30 am and 6:00 pm I had about a 15 minute bread where a went over to the house and grabbed some lunch. We did finish all the interviews, however, including one interview with a prospective missionary who had completed his missionary recommendation papers and needed me to interview him and prepare the papers to be submitted.

At mid-afternoon, a young woman came in with her mother and child. The mother explained that the young woman was from Kiribati and wanted to go to the U.S. to visit her sister and witness the wedding of her nephew. The U.S. Embassy had denied her request for a visa. I wrote a letter to the Embassy indicating that she was an active member of a specific ward and stake in Kiribati and assured them that she had a home in Kiribati and was surely going to come back once she finished her business in the U.S. They seemed to be happy with the letter and left planning to go to the Embassy the next day to begin their appeal of the original conclusion.

Jan and I came back to the house and had a fairly quick dinner and then began our planning for packing to go to Vanuatu tomorrow early morning (our flight leaves a 6:30 am and we will leave our house around 5am). We then went back over to the office for about an hour doing some last minute things at the office before coming back to make final packing plans and getting ready for bed. This was definitely one of those stressful days. By the way, our seats had already been assigned for the flight tomorrow so we will be fine there. I didn’t get a report from the assistants as to what the condition of our tickets and seat assignments are for the trip to New Caledonia but I’ll talk with them while they take us to the airport tomorrow.