Week 18 on Tarawa

Our week 18 started with a group family home evening.  President Weir let us preview his missionary copy of "Meet the Mormons".  We had popcorn and water and watched on a wide screen projector.  It was just like home.  Tuesday, the 13th, was someone's birthday celebration.  But since we had a senior dinner Sunday evening, we had already blown out the matches and had cake and ice cream.  It was just like home.

On Thursday, Elders Nielson and Johansson of the 70 arrived to reorganize the Tarawa East Stake.  As usual, there was a wonderful cultural evening with dancing and food.  The program really was well done.  They practiced for a week before the performance.

This is one of the young men's dances.

On Friday the senior couples hosted Elders Nielson and Johansson for a delicious lasagna dinner. Elder Nielson shared some inspirational stories about President Monson and Lavelle Edwards.

After the dinner Friday evening, Taraia, our school's head secretary, invited us to a celebration of her daughter Mary's 21st birthday.  It was quite an event all by itself with much pomp, dancing, and food. 




You can see the elaborate cakes in the picture below.

Sunday was our stake conference, and unlike any meeting we attended in the past 4-1/2 months, people had filled up the building half an hour before the meeting started. We were lucky to find two seats together indoors.  Chairs were set up in the surrounding halls and rooms and a PA system let them hear the meeting.  We had FM headsets so we could hear the English translation.

The Saturday leadership and adult sessions were only 1 hour apart, so we invited the senior couple who lives off campus and the mission nurse to have pizza at our place.  We actually had real cheese, real ham, black olives, mushrooms, and green peppers.  It wasn't quite as good as Papa Murphy's, but it was really very tasty.

This is a picture of a wonderful meatloaf that we made together on Sunday.  We thought we'd let you know that we are actually eating quite well.  We have much more than fish and rice as our bathroom scale can attest. So far neither of us has lost any weight.  Boo hoo.




The final picture below shows us back to teaching.  It has been a long break and it actually felt good to be working again.  This technology class is the first class we have taught in the computer lab.