Week 70 in Tarawa

For my birthday this past week, Sister Sumner baked me a cherry pie! (She can bake a cherry pie, quick as you can wink an eye; she's a young thing and cannot leave  her mother.)  The 2 cans of pie cherries were purchased in Australia during our trip there last month since they're not available on Tarawa.  In this picture she's rolling out the crust.

Now that the filling is in, she's rolling out the top crust.  Notice how cleverly she uses a baking sheet to keep the crust from sticking to the rolling pin.  In the picture above, I had her remove the baking sheet to show the dough she was working on.

With the heart cut out on top (true love), the pie is ready for the oven.

Here I am, cutting the pie into 9 slices for our senior couple family home evening treat.

Lighting the candles.

Getting ready to blow out the candles after everyone sang Happy Birthday accompanied by me on the piano, just like at home!

These are 5 of my pie eating assistants.  From left to right: Sister Waldron, Elder Waldron, Elder Jenks, Sister Jenks, and Sister Alldredge.

The other 2 pie eating assistants are Elder and Sister Olson.  Note the piano I've borrowed from the choir room during the school break.  The pie maker and birthday boy are in the background.

We taught EDU 430 Classroom Management in the TALL lab each day this past week from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.  We had 6 students, but 2 of them were taking the class for professional development rather than BYUH Teaching Certificate credit.  What you can't hear in this picture is the jack hammer breaking up the concrete porch in front of houses 8 and 9 just outside the room.

Aneta, our school nurse, Miiran, our music/choir teacher, and Tereke, our carpentry teacher, are hard at work during class.

So are Tipo (left) and Kevin (right).  Tipo is one of our Vice Principals and Kevin is our new computer science teacher.

Each day Sister Sumner provided a nice snack to break up the 5 hour long class.

On Wednesday, however, the class members turned the tables and brought me a birthday cake.

So once again everyone sang Happy Birthday and I had to blow out some more candles.  I know it's a tough job, but it's only once a year.

I requested spaghetti for my birthday dinner, and once again, Sister Sumner came through.  Yumm!

On Saturday we went with Sister Alldredge to visit some sister apartments.  Sister Tiatia, seated on the bed, has been fighting a cold.  Although the picture is small and hard to see, you get an idea of the living conditions the young elders and sisters endure.  You can see the mosquito netting above the bed.

The tap water in their apartment was not working, so they collect rain water off the roof and use it for drinking as well as washing.  It's amazing they're not sick more often than they are.

This is the view behind one of the sister apartments.  It's so idyllic and yet so poverty stricken.

Saturday afternoon we had a baptism on campus.  All four youngsters are from different families. Some were taught by the sisters and some by the elders.

I thought about cropping this picture to better show the baptism, but instead wanted you to get a feel for the vastness of the surrounding ocean.

The baptism was supposed to start at 5 p.m., but we had to wait for one of the baptism candidates to show up.  We actually started the baptismal service around 6:30.  That gave me about an hour and a half to play prelude music.  During that time, I worked up a musical number with Elder Ah-to, who has a beautiful singing voice.  He sang "I'm trying to be like Jesus".  As the evening wore on while we waited, we had a beautiful sunset, which accounts for the pink colored windows behind me.

Sister Sumner took this picture looking west out of the chapel windows, but it doesn't begin to show the wonderful colors.

The elders and sisters finally finished the New Year's puzzle this week.  We were able to help some, but they did most of the work.  Try as I might, I could not get the blogger program to load this picture correctly.  The original really is right side up.  I even tried making the original upside down, and it still wouldn't load it correctly.  Oh well.  It's getting late, so you'll just have to stand on your heads to see it right.





Janet and I were both asked to speak in sacrament meeting today, Sunday January 17th, in addition to her teaching the Relief Society Lesson and me teaching the Sunday School lesson.  She spoke about the Area Plan regarding honoring the Sabbath Day at home as well as at church.  I spoke about the Area Plan goal of seeking the blessings of the temple.  It was a spiritual feast for us both to prayerfully consider what we could say to touch their hearts and lift their spirits.  We felt the spirit as we delivered our messages and taught our lessons.  Doing what the Lord asks us to do is never a burden if we do it with the spirit of the Holy Ghost.  We've had a Sabbath Day that was truly a delight, as Elder Nelson said in a recent conference talk.