Another Week in Paradise!

This has been a very busy week but it keeps us happy!  We taught three sessions of our Pedagogy course then took a day to go to Sauniatu to help a few of the teachers with their English.  We are having a lot of rain.  It can rain one or two inches in just an hour here.  Our new neighbors arrived yesterday.  They are the Williams from Orem, Utah.  They are going to be auditors here.  They will go home about the same time that we will be in 18 months. 

Rambutan fruit given to us by the home economics teacher

We have our directors (the Holbrooks) coming this week so we will be busy with them.  It will be good to see them again.  We will try to have a few pictures from our adventures next week. 

I included a couple of pictures we took this week of our apartment.  One is of a sunset above our house.

Sunset over our house

Our apartment

New Kitchen!

We had a busy week that was punctuated by the installation of a new kitchen in our apartment.  We had a leaky kitchen faucet that ruined the counter top so Thursday we came home to new counter tops with a shiny double sink.  We just had a single sink before so doing the dishes just got a little easier.

New counter top and sink

Elder & Sister Wright from Grants Pass, Oregon just arrived to be the area dentists.  We got to know them when we took them to Vavau beach yesterday.  If we were to have a favorite beach, it would be Vavau (which means "forever").

We started teaching our third class, Effective Pedagogy.  We will be teaching three days a week for a couple of hours each day for the next couple of months.

The lagoon at Vavau beach (beautiful snorkeling).

A cute crab making off with a good shell

Vavau Beach looking east

We are excited to have our neighbors, the Wights, come and visit us in April.  It will be so good to see them.

Savai'i, Baha'i Temple, and the Storm

We took a quick trip this Monday & Tuesday to Savai'i to help out the ITEP couple there get a few things started.  We took the early ferry over and worked with them until the afternoon then went to the north of the island and stayed in a beach fale that was pretty cool.  The resort was right on the beach and the beautiful water.  We came home the following day and in the middle of the ferry trip home, it really started raining and blowing.  It was a pretty wild trip.  Come to find out, it was the last time the ferry ran for three days and there were people stranded on both sides of the ferry while it rained and stormed.  We felt fortunate that we made it home.  We spent the morning playing in the ocean and it was really nice.

View of ocean outside of fale

Pool at resort with beach fale

The Baha'i Temple

Pretty plant at the Baha'i Temple

Ferry to Savai'i

We spent the rest of the week in some of our teacher's classrooms observing them teach lessons in the format of the class we are teaching them.  It was fun.

We took a trip Saturday to the Baha'i temple here.  It is one of only 8 they have built in the world.  It is a beautiful campus.  Their religion was started in the early 1800's in Persia and is quite inclusive.

This coming week we will finish one class and start another.  We are going to be busy teaching three times a week.  It usually takes a full day to prepare for each lesson.

We are grateful to be on our mission.  We work hard and play hard and are glad to do this in our young phase of retirement!

Pineapple!

The weeks are flying by.  We are obviously keeping busy so don't notice the days slipping by.  We had the first full week of school with the students here.  There were assemblies, dances, and more teacher training (that we presented for).  Suddenly, the campus is alive with hundreds of people and we even have to take turns on the one-lane roads around the campus.

Our School Campus at Pesega

Sunset with our palm tree in front of our house

Temple at dusk from our office

This week we have been busy preparing lessons for our next series of lessons.  We will start our next class on February 14th.  BYU-Hawaii EDU 312 (Effective Pedagogy).  We should have quite a few teachers take the class because now we have 23 teachers between the middle and high school that need the ITEP Certificate.

Our little pineapple blossom!

We are headed to the other Island first thing this next week to help the new couple there with some of the start up forms and files.  We will also spend the night on the beach in a fale.

We were excited to see one of our pineapple plants pushing up a fruit blossom.  I have also planted some peppers and zucchini seeds.  Our tomato plants are blooming and setting fruit.  I also have two small watermelons growing!


We send our love to all of you.  We miss you terribly but know that our time will pass quickly and we will be able to embrace our loved ones once again.  We will sign off before we have to  change the name of this blog to "Sappy in Samoa." 😊