Our last blog for New Zealand will be a bit delayed while we spend a few days in Sydney, Australia going to the temple with one of the stakes here in New Zealand.
A little snapshot while we have a little WiFi...Niue is a beautiful little Island. Most of the coast is just cliffs and caves that drop into the deep ocean. This is our LMS (London Missionary Society) friend Aggie. She is a widow from Fiji with great faith and an amazing story. Her home is one of the nicer homes. Most of the 1500-1600 residents have very little in the way of things we would call conveniences: *Washers but no dryers *Solar driven Power...most of the time *WiFi...hmmmm...spotty for us and most 2G some 4G *Phones-4 digit numbers but many don't have a mobile phone *Addresses...there are NONE, you just live by someone or something or "just a little down the road" *Stores-one grocery store and several little convenience type stores on the whole island. If you need something you have to have it shipped in on the monthly boat. Businesses including government are open very sporadic, convenient to the employees. ...
Tiritiri Matangi Island On an open Saturday we were able to take a ferry and go to Tiritiri Matangi Island, a bird habitat and sanctuary. It's a peaceful and beautiful little island just north east of where we live, and it happened to be a nice warm spring day, so we hopped on the ferry... ... with new-found-friends and fellow-travelers Tom and Bev from Taranaki, and lots of volunteers. The wharf where we embarked was a yacht club at Shakespeare Park's Gulf Harbour. The ferry was less than a 30 minutes sail among heaps of other boats who thought it was a great spring day too. Our boat was "the Explorer " Not hard to fall in love right away with the beautiful island bird sanctuary, continuously inhabited only by heaps of happy, mostly carefree birds. Sanctuaries are “places of protection and refuge, safe havens, asylums, even sacred places. “ We took a 3 hou...
It’s a new semester at the Universities, and for us at the Institute (AIB) as well. We set out on our mission thinking we could do and be everything, teach 10 classes each, climb every mountain and ford every stream the YSA's do, stay out late every night with them, go to every activity in all 13 stakes, write every night in our journals, eat 3 square meals a day and cook for the YSA too, change hearts, remember everybody's names and not miss our grandkids and all of you. Well, we found out quickly we CAN'T. We CAN barely teach 3 classes, we have bags under our eyes and we can't even pronounce most of their names, let alone remember them. So we are learning to just concentrate on the CANS The few things at least that we CAN do. We can teach a bit (Vance is teaching classes on the Book of Mormon, Teachings of the Living Prophets, and The Eternal Family. Louenda has Old Testament, the Restored Gospel and Christian History, and Teachings and D...
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