Another new week and we start it off with FHE on Monday night. FHE was billed as a Talent Night, but it ended up being a karaoke night. I only got a couple picture of Shine singing. She was the first one to sing. She is not shy at all to sing in front of people. She likes to dance as she sings - bobbing with the beat. After she sang, they turned off the lights, so I couldn't get any good pictures. Some of the students sang songs in their native tongues - Tagalog (Filipino), Japanese, French. Kahealani sang "Fallen" by Alicia Keyes and did an awesome rendition. I tried to get Elder Rappleye to sing "Sweet Caroline" with me, but he wouldn't do it. I didn't want to do it by myself, so we both were chickens and didn't sing.
Here's pictures of the Food Warehouse office decorated for Valentine's Day. I washed all the windows inside and out before putting the hearts on them. I don't think they've been washed the whole time I've been here.
On Tuesday, I got a couple pictures of Elder Rappleye and Alex Tam working on modifying the first aid cart by installing a utility box in the back of the cart to carry first aid supplies in it. Tuesday night we had planned to do temple sealings at the Laie Temple. I had made an appointment and added extra guests so we could invite some of the female students in our YSA ward to come help us seal daughters to their parents. We got one student, Maria, from Indonesia, to come help us. The only problem was that when we arrived at the temple, they said I didn't have an appointment. I was sure I had made an appointment and had even seen an email reminder the day before. When I finally found the appointment notice on my phone, I realized I had accidentally made the appointment for the Jordan River temple! That was not going to work. Thankfully there was room in the 6:30pm sealing session (I had made a 6 pm appointment and the Laie temple does sealings on the half hour😕😖😞😦), so we were still able to do the sealings. In my confusion and embarrassment, I forgot to get a picture of us with Maria, so I uploaded a photo from her Facebook page. Since we had to wait awhile for the 6:30pm session to start, we were able to talk with Maria and get to know her a little bit.
On Wednesday during our town run stops, we had to pick up rubber stamps for the Fiji island village for their tattooing station (temporary tattoos). It was a new place that we have never stopped at before. On the magnetic board in the lobby, they had displayed a "Charles" name magnetic. I made Elder Rappleye pose for a picture holding his name magnet.
As we drive around the Honolulu area, we often drive along Honolulu's elevated rail system called Skyline. The columns (6 - 7 feet wide by 30 feet high) holding up the rail are concrete engraved with Hawaiian designs. At first, I thought every column was the same design, but then I noticed that there are different designs on the columns. Two of the designs are shown in the collage to the left. It was another long town run day with 13 stops.
Wednesday night was the Masters of the Flame PCC employee competition. We watched this competition last year when Kina, one of the employees in the Food Warehouse was competing (he's now working on the grounds crew). I've shown pictures of him doing fireknife dancing at different occasions in previous blog posts. This year we got great seats to watch the competition plus we were sitting with a group of senior missionaries. Kina was competing again this year. The bottom right photo shows all the male competitors, and the yellow arrow is pointing to Kina. The top left photo shows the drummers. They beat the drums the whole time the competitors are twirling the fireknife. The top right shows the junior competitors (boys younger than 18 years of age). One of the boys is only 8 years old! The bottom left picture shows the female competitors. I've included a link to a highlight reel if you want to see live action of the event. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1252355889157837
Here are a few professional pictures I found on Facebook of the competition. They capture the motion much better than my phone camera does.
Here's some of the pictures I got on my phone. I can't zoom in as close, and they all have a red tone to them because of the lighting. They are definitely not as good as the professionals with the high-quality camera equipment.
We were pretty beat from the long town run day, so we left around 9pm after the men performed. I was mostly interested in seeing how well Kina did. When we left, they hadn't announced the winners, but in my opinion, I thought Kina did really well and had a good chance of placing. He had definitely improved his skills, and he was one of only 2 or 3 competitors that only dropped their fireknife once during their whole routine. The rest of the competitors dropped it multiple times.
The next day I was so excited to find out that Kina took 3rd place! He also finished in 2nd place in the double fireknife dance - that's when they twirl 2 fireknifes at the same time! Kina's holding up his arms in the top picture that shows the men's winners. The bottom pictures show the women winners and the junior winners.
Shout out to our daughter-in-law, Jasmin Rappleye, who was a guest "gospel scholar" on BYUTV's "Come Follow Up" episode this week. She did a great job discussing Doctrine and Covenants Sections 6 - 9. Just like Oliver Cowdery was given the "gift of Aaron" from God, she has also been given a gift from God to be able to present the gospel and truth in a very intelligent, yet relatable way. Now that this episode has aired, some of the senior missionaries we serve with are asking us, "Are you related to Jasmin Rappleye?" It's so fun to be able to say, "Yes, she is our daughter-in-law!"
Thursday was our 3-month left mark. We took the picture out on the Gateway Terrace while we were eating lunch. Elder Rappleye is wearing his "uniform" and I'm wearing "Aloha wear" because Thursday is my day to go out and greet the guests as they get off the tour buses and answer any questions and hand out maps of the PCC.
After work, Sister Sauve came over to our pad and we put together Valentine treat bags for the student workers in the Food Warehouse. We made 20 of them and we will give them to the students next week for Valentine's Day. On Friday, Elder Rappleye and I made an emergency town run for the Food Warehouse to pick up mochi. Mochi is a Japanese dessert made with sweet glutinous rice flour wrapped around a sweet center to form a small bite-sized confection with a chewy smooth elastic texture. It is used in the cookies they make for the Luaus and Gateway Buffet. They use the mini mochi in place of chocolate chips. You can see from the picture that we picked up strawberry mini mochi. There was a miscommunication because when we arrived Lili, my boss, was already there picking up the mochi. She had already gone down to Honolulu with her daughter to pick out flowers for her daughter's wedding. Lili didn't know we had been sent down to pick it up. It worked out because we were able to put it in the cargo van and take it back to the PCC and Lili and her daughter were able to finish what they needed to do.
Saturday morning, I had an uninvited guest watching me cook breakfast. I'm grateful I've only seen small geckos in our pad and I haven't seen them very often. I'm not sure I could handle seeing the big ones in our house. We have heard the Bates telling us all about the resort, Ko 'Olena on the west side of the island. They go hang out there on their p-days quite often. After hearing them talk about it so often, we decided we should go check it out ourselves. They told us you have to get there early because there is limited free parking available. It's about an hour and 20-minute drive to the resort from where we live. We got to the entrance of the resort by 9:20am, but the sign said the lots were already full! Since we had brought our bathing suits for a morning at the beach, we decided to go find another beach to hang out at. We ended up at Pu'uloa Beach Park in Ewa Beach. It's a small locals beach. You can see in the right-hand picture we had a view of Diamond Head in the distance (far right edge of the picture). On Monday when we talked to the Bates about going to Ko 'Olena resort they told us that the sign for the free parking lots is not updated very often and even if it says they are full, they are not necessarily full, but we should have checked them out to see if there were any open spots. If we decide to try again, that's what we will have to do. It's such a long way to drive, I'm not sure we will try again. We have great beaches much closer to us. One of the reasons we decided to try to go to Ko 'Olena Resort was that it was close to The Cheesecake Factory restaurant in Kapolei. Elder Rappleye's sister, Betty Ann had given us a gift card to The Cheesecake Factory for Christmas that we wanted to finally go use. So, after spending a few hours at the beach, we headed over to The Cheesecake Factory restaurant for lunch. The weather was very pleasant, so we requested to sit out on the patio where it was not quite as noisy. We haven't gone out to eat very much during our whole mission, so it was a treat to enjoy lunch and a piece of Hershey's chocolate bar cheesecake. Thanks, Betty Ann and Steve!
After church on Sunday, Faye, one of the students in our YSA Ward, asked us to help her with her Eternal Marriage religion class assignment. She had an assignment to interview a couple who have been married a long time and sealed in the temple. She interviewed us about how we met, how we chose to get married, and how we made our marriage work. I'm not sure how well we answered her questions, but we were delighted to help her with her class assignment. We found out that she is engaged to someone back home in the Philippines. It's common to find students engaged to someone back in their home country, especially the Filipinos. We had our monthly district meeting Sunday evening at the visitor's center. The Christus in the visitor's center always makes a great backdrop for our district picture - left to right: Elder Gammon, Sister Gammon, Sister Tate, Elder Tate, Elder Timothy, Sister Timothy, Sister Rappleye, Elder Rappleye, Sister Lee, and Elder Lee. We also saw Sister Mansaloon and Sister Pabalate doing their shift at the Visitor's Center, so we had to get a picture with them. We also were celebrating Sister Timothy's birthday later this month. She's the only February birthday in our district. Elder Hudnall, a senior missionary serving at BYU-H, gave us a presentation on suicide prevention. He and his wife are facilitating the starting up of a HOPE squad at BYU-H. From Wikipedia: Hope Squad is an educational program developed to address mental health and suicide prevention in schools. It was founded in 2004. It was founded by Greg Hudnall (Elder Hudnall), a former principal in Provo, Utah, following a series of student suicides, the most notable occurring in 1997 involving a 14-year-old student. Hope Squad's approach involves training students to recognize and respond to mental distress and suicidal ideation among their peers. Its establishment was a response to high rates of youth suicide in the western United States.
We all need to be watch dogs for those we know and love for warning signs of suicide tendencies. The one website that Elder Hudnall recommended all of us can access for help in this matter, but especially parents, is shown in the picture to the left. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also has lots of resources online to help educate and help with suicide prevention. I am including a link just in case anyone might be interested.
No comments:
Post a Comment