It's Hot

It is hard for us to believe that it is January as we go around sweating. It has gotten very hot here this week. We thought that the rainy season had come last week as we had two days of fairly hard rainfall that put down about 12 inches in two days but we found out that it was the result of a tropical storm that has hit along the north coast of Australia. The rainy season is from the monsoons that everyone assures us will come. The flooding and foaming that you may be seeing on the news is about 600-800 miles south of us but is from the same storm. We know that only 2 missionary apartments have been flooded.

We did our first traveling for Enoch to fulfuill his calling as a district councilman to a town called Bowen.It is about a two hour drive. We found a very small Branch there with about 10 people attending church. They are Tongan and have many struggles to keep the Branch going. The Tongans came to Australia as migrant workers and many continue to do that but the Branch President is studying to become a diseal mechanic so that he will not have to move his family around. He was called as the Branch President when he was single so he went back to Tonga for Christmas about 4 years ago and asked a girl to marry him and come to Australia with him to help him in his calling. They had only met once before this proposal and she was not to sure about it but she said she would go if her parents said yes. The young man is a returned missionary and seemed okay to the parents and so they said yes and marraige plans were made and the couple were married the next week in the Tongan Temple and they moved to Bowen.They have 2 beautiful little girls 1 and 2 and will have a new baby next month. The 1 year old was born premature and only weighed 2 lbs but was found healthy by the doctors and sent home 2 days later and she has thrived. Where this woman lived in Tonga the church is very large, almost all the people on the island are church members (she went to Liahona high school) she said the first Sunday she just assumed everyone was late getting to church but said when she turned around and realized that was it, she started to cry. She said they will not give up though. Bowen is a beautiful small town on the ocean and has the Whitsunday islands in that area. Many wealthy people live there as there a couple of mining towns about an hour away. This Branch will swell to about 60 people April - November when the migrant workers return but for some reason there records don't ever come - no one really knows how to get them we think is the problem.

President Langland visited on Thursday and we made lunch for him before the business he came to take care of. It was nice to see him and visit with him. 35 new missionaries arriving in March, we don't know if we will get more up here or not. The work here is hard as we visit less actives and invite them back, we haven't had many yeses, some have joined other churches. When we get discouraged we have to think about Jesus and the fact that he didn't have much success either!

Enoch was in charge of "man making" this week and it was quite successful about 20 attended. They learned barbecuing tips and ate their samples. Enoch took baked beans to share and they were a big hit. The men all made bean sandwiches!

We are off to help clean the church.