Weeks 23-30

My, how time flies!  It's amazing how generic some weeks can be and others are so full of various activities.  However, the generic are never mundane!  This week was a temple day with our Area Presidency.  We are blessed to go to the temple once a month with these wonderful men and their wives, but since these are the summer months Elders Funk and Evans had gone home to the US for a month and left us with our new authority, Elder Meurs.  While Elder Meurs returned to Australia to pack up his house we were orphans for a couple of weeks.  We look forward to having the entire presidency back with us again.

Saturday morning Dan and I decided to hike up
to Lion Rock behind the temple which is about a two or three mile hike up a fairly steep mountain.  Much of the hike has steps cut into the mountain which made it double hard to come down since it's very hard on your legs.  To make matters worse, it was one of the hottest days of the year at 34 C which equates to 93 degrees F with 95% humidity.  Very miserable!  Up at the top was the real treat with a 360 degree view of Hong Kong and a breeze!  Along the trail going back downhill we ran into a very large monkey!  He was walking toward us on the trail.  Since we had just heard that monkeys

are mean I was very scared, but he veered off just before we were about to meet.  The best part about the hike was the Fanta float that we drank at the end of our hike.  Later that evening we went out for pizza with some of the senior missionaries and saw the new Cars movie.

We left for Vietnam on Monday morning.  We spent the first few days in HoChiMinh City which is down South Vietnam.  The mission president, President Hassell assigned us two sister missionaries to take us to the hospitals that Dan was supposed to evaluate.  We were quite impressed with how modern and beautiful these hospitals and clinics were since our last visit to Vietnam about 15 years ago.  At that time in

Hanoi the hospitals were very old and rundown and of course did not have any modern technology.  These new hospitals were outfitted with all of the latest and greatest.  Unfortunately, there are so  many new hospitals there now that they are very expensive so they people go to the older less expensive hospitals.  Many hospitals and doctors' offices are quite silent.

Dan had the blessing of the Area Presidency to continue his Operation Smile surgeries as long as they were in the Asia Area, so he spent the next couple of days repairing cleft lips and palettes on little children in Vietnam.  I, meanwhile, had a glorious time reading and eating M&Ms ALL DAY LONG since we were staying in an area where there wasn't anywhere to go and it wasn't safe to be out alone.

After eating our first dinner in a not-so-yummy restaurant we found a Pizza Hut the next night.  While we were eating a Caucasian family came in and one of them had a BYU-I shirt on.  We had a great time talking with them.  They were from North Dakota visiting their daughter-in-law's parents who lived way out in the country.  The son had served a Vietnamese mission in California, met a girl from Vietnam and was taking his parents to meet the in-laws.  They had been there for five weeks and were very anxious to get home.

Dan went alone the next day to visit a hospital since he had been operating all day (I read a second novel!)  He was chatting with the hospital administrator and his assistant after the visit when the administrator told his assistant to take Dan to see the new clinic.  She promptly handed him--a helmet!  So Dan hopped on her motor scooter behind her (the main mode of transportation in Vietnam) and rode an hour away to visit the new clinic, and then back home in the driving rain.  The entire two hours on the scooter ride they discussed our religion.  She agreed to have the missionaries visit her and we just got word that she wants to be baptized!  Mysterious ways......

Dr. Nguyen The Hung and Daughter-in-law Phuong

This Vietnamese Elder is from Mesa, just a few miles
from where Dr. Hung's daughter Hanna lives!

When we flew to Hanoi we were met by two Elders who accompanied us to the hospitals there.  Dan has quite a few contacts in Hanoi due to his Operation Smile visits over the years.  One of the doctors, Nguyen The Hung stayed with us in the early 90's for six weeks and bonded with our kids.  We were so happy when he brought his family to Utah to see us two years ago.  We were able to take them to Temple Square, chat with the Vietnamese sister missionaries and give them a Book of Mormon.  At the time there was no mission in Vietnam. 

This mission is only 15 months old.  We went to see Dr. Hung and his wife at their home and found that she has advanced cancer.  We were very happy to see each other but it was bitter-sweet.  He took us to dinner with several of the doctors that we knew from past visits, and the next night had dinner in another doctor's home that Dan also knew from before.

We were able to see the water puppet show which was very fun.  They had a live 'orchestra' and singers.  Google Hanoi water puppets for a look at what it is.  The next day we went to church which was held in a rented home and met several very faithful Vietnamese Saints.  It's amazing how fast the church is growing there. 

Back in Hong Kong, we were in charge of the senior activity the next Saturday which was to the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.  It's an amazing museum which has many facets to it including basic Chinese history, artistic history, history of the royalty and even a large Bruce Lee exhibit.  We all had a great and instructional time.

On Wednesday we had another typhoon.  This time it was a category 10 so all of Hong Kong was shut down.  Since our computer system had been so slow for the past couple of weeks and most of my job requires much computer uploading we decided to go to the office anyway and get our work done while no one was using the bandwidth.  We managed to get here via the last train before even the subway trains quit running.  We were the only ones here working but got much done while looking out the window and watching the trees bend nearly to

the ground.  Afterwards we saw the destruction of the storm with windows blown out, trees uprooted or broken, etc. Certain parts of Hong Kong had very much destruction.  However, Texas had their hurricane on the heels of ours which makes us grateful that we didn't suffer the same type of damage.

I had to give the devotional message on eternal marriage the following Monday, and Dan had to give one shortly thereafter on faith.  These are 15 minute lessons from Preach My Gospel that we take turns giving to the senior missionaries during our district meeting which follows the devotional which includes all of the employees.

We were so happy to have our dear friends Alan and Julianne Holland spend a day with us!  They
were on an Asian cruise which stopped one day in Hong Kong.  We mapped out ahead of time the most interesting things to see and do in Hong Kong in one day and even did a trial run!  We took them to the Wong Tai Sin Temple which is a large Buddhist temple with lots and lots of statues (gods) and incense.  Next we went to our temple, to an outdoor market, to dim sum, to Victoria Peak and had them back to their ship in time to sail away.  What a wonderful day!

This was the week for flu shots!  We had people traipsing into Dan's office all week long for their
flu shots.  No one really wanted to get the shots, but all agreed that his shots were painless!  Way to go!

We attended an Operation Smile gala with our good friends, the Anderson's, which was a fundraiser for Hong Kong.  It by far was the fanciest event I've ever attended.  The decorations were way over the top.  The tables were magnificent.  The theme was Masquerade so they had wonderful singers who performed the song from Phantom of the Opera.  Each place setting had a beautiful mask as well as a bag of goodies to take home.  There was lots of professional singing and dancing and of course, talking.  (in Chinese)  With the amount of money they spent, I hope they received a lot of donations!

Alice and Tai Chan, Alice Chiu, Alan and Jill Anderson

Saturday was our first concert in our 'series of concerts' for our choir.  It wasn't really our concert, but we sang six songs.  It was held in a cultural center and featured Mormon talent from throughout Hong Kong.  It was fabulous!  It had singers, instrumentalists including two stringed instruments that are native to China, drummers, etc.  The talent was very outstanding.  I was able to accompany Sydney Walker on two songs.  She is a young woman living in Hong Kong with her husband from Mesa, Arizona and has a wonderful voice.

The next week we were blessed (yah, right!) to speak in the Everyday Branch, which means that we spoke Tuesday through Friday to the Filipino Branch.  This was our second time doing that since we spoke shortly after our arrival here.  It works out to about once every six months.  So we're off the hook on that for awhile.  However, the next week I taught the Institute lesson to the senior sister missionaries, so I guess I'm off the hook on that one for two months. 

That same week we went with an Operation Smile representative to give a presentation to a group of Brownies and their leaders at an international school on Operation Smile.  I was amazed at some of the intelligent questions they asked.  Hopefully it raised their awareness of some of the seemingly injustices in the world involving children of other countries and cultures.

A fun outing this week with the senior missionaries, including the temple and mission home senior missionaries was to have lunch at the Hopewell Center.  We were on the 62nd floor (not the top--and not even close to the tallest building in Hong Kong!)  and had a wonderful revolving view of Hong Kong--like the Seattle Space Needle.  The lunch was outstanding which was a buffet of Asian and American food.  We all enjoyed
this fun socializing event.

I end our epistle with our delightful dinner with Manfred Lai and his wife, Ashley and four-year-old daughter, Gabby.  They treated us to dinner at a Thai restaurant Saturday.  We had spent the day running quite a few errands so it was very relaxing to be with them.  Gabby was very happy to receive the little gift that we brought for her, a small collection of Disney princesses.  She reminded me of our precious granddaughters when they were her age enjoying the same little toys.

 We send our greetings and love and testimony of the beauty of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all.