Sister Sumner still faithfully walks every morning unless it is raining. She walks with Sister Alldredge and, when she's here, Sister Weir, our mission president's wife. It's a glorious time of day to walk as the sky brightens in the east while the air is still relatively cool, but she still comes back drenched in sweat. This picture is one of dozens she takes of the beauty of this island. They are always greeted with "mauri" by the locals who see them so regularly, and by the children who wave and smile while calling out, "I-matang", the local word for white people.
Monday, September 26th, Sister Sumner baked chocolate chip cookies to take to our missionary meeting and our ITEP class. She had to go to the office for a few minutes with one of our teacher-students, and asked me, Elder Sumner, to take the cookies out of the oven when the timer rang. To make a long story short, we both blew it! I stepped out of the apartment for a while with the missionaries and forgot the cookies. As you can see, they came out a beautiful golden brown, but edible only by me. Sister Sumner half forgave me, however, when she discovered that she had set her timer for 4 hours instead of 4 minutes. I enjoyed a batch cooked "my way", and Sister Sumner has finally forgiven me the last half. Everyone loved the "unburned" (as she calls them) cookies shown at the top of the picture.
Armine Solomone helped the girls plan a service project for their activity Wednesday evening. They made sock dolls for the nursery. I am the proud donor of three pair of socks which made 6 dolls!
Her the girls are sewing up the socks where the legs are cut. Notice the lollipop sticks in their mouths that Sister Sumner donated to make the activity just a little sweeter.
Here the girls are stuffing the socks with shredded foam. They often seem more comfortable working while seated on the floor than at a table. Most homes don't have tables and chairs, so eating and many other activities are done in this manner.
Leilani, Armine's daughter, is the Young Women's President. I don't mean "the Laurel President", but the YW president. Ours is a student ward, after all. She is gluing parts of the faces onto the socks using hot melt glue. She is using a lit candle to melt the hot melt glue because there are no glue guns here! Just another example of how people here make do with what they have.
Here's the finished product. The children in the nursery will be delighted. Obviously, this young woman is still relishing her lollipop.
At a surprise faculty meeting Thursday morning, Mike Carthew, the man on the right and the Area Director of Church Schools, announced that Lita, our principal for the past 13 years, has been asked to become the Director of Seminaries and Institutes on Tarawa. Many tears were shed as she spoke of her 26 years of experience at Moroni High School. We have grown to love and respect her immensely in the past year, and we will miss our daily interactions with her when she leaves her principalship on December 1st.
Our new principal, starting December 1st, will be Banririe (pronounced Ban dee dee ay), who is currently our 1st Vice Principal. He is also the 1st counselor in our Stake Presidency.
Only her hair dresser knows for sure, but since I'm the one who colors her hair, and Sister Alldredge is the one who cuts her hair, we can categorically state that she looks at least 10 years younger than she did last week.
Saturday evening we had another micro ant invasion. Amazingly, they found the lollipops we left on top of the fridge in a sealed Ziploc bag. We didn't realize that a lollipop stick had poked a tiny hole in the side of the bag. The sealed edge of the bag was touching the wall beside the fridge, and the ants came marching in big time. If you look carefully, you can see the ant bodies on the paper towel remaining from our Battle of the Lollipops. I had to shake ants off of each lollipop one at a time, which wouldn't have been so hard except that these lollipops have hollow sticks. The ants would crawl right up through the sticks to find the exposed candy inside. The wrappers kept the ants off of the outside. We hope we got all of the ants out or some unlucky lollipop licker is in for a rude surprise.
We've been able to hear bits and pieces of General Conference live, but we will be able to watch all sessions next weekend when the Stake replays the broadcasts from DVD's they receive. The translation department here will be busy all week doing Kiribati voice overs so that the people here can also hear the words of our prophet and apostles. We loved the talks we've heard so far, especially Elder Holland's talk on the divine roll of mothers and how much their love is like the Savior's love. We love our mission.
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