Our Mission Experience in Vanuatu

  Hello Family and Friends! I love that Mark and I take turns writing this letter each week.   Although, he seems to get the weeks when we are very busy; and there is plenty to talk about.   I have to say this week was pretty routine. We began our week with our Seminary & Institute team meeting with Katimal our Coordinator, and Vicky, his assistant.   This week was Vicky's last full week with Seminary & Institute.   She has been in this role for 8 years. She has taken a full-time position as administrative assistant in the Facility Management (FM) team for the church across Vanuatu.   We will miss serving with Vicky. Our Loss is the FM group’s dream come true!    The work must move forward and that is what we are here to do.   In our meeting we had a chance to report back on the success of our trip to Santo; which we shared with yo last week. On Monday Mark and I had the chance to make some phone calls and follow up with some ...

  Hello Family and Friends, This week it’s my turn to write. If you haven’t followed us recently, Darleen and I alternate letter writing responsibilities so you can see the different perspectives we each bring. It also gives us both a little break. These letters are fun to look back on and remember what we’ve done, though they do take effort to put together (at least for me). We hope you enjoy this small taste of our weekly adventures here in Vanuatu. Since Sunday was Mother’s Day, I want to start by saying thank you to all the mothers and women in my life who have shown me the power of a mother’s love. I’ve been blessed with wonderful examples: my own mother, who is the best example of caring and Christlike service (not biased, but I think I got the best one); my grandmother Mabel Fales, who was strong in the gospel; my beautiful wife Darleen, who is an amazing mother to our three children and loves our grandchildren unconditionally; my sisters Cheryl, Laurie, and Becky (the best ...

Hello Family and Friends! We are not missing in action; you may have noticed we did not send out a blog update last week. We came back from Tanna anticipating that we would leave for the island of Santo for another teacher training. We received word that the Santo district would be watching General Conference on the day we had scheduled the in‑service training for our teachers. In addition, we totally forgot that school was out for the week of April 20th through the 24th. When there is no school, there is no seminary and no SIS. We would have had no classes to visit. We moved our trip to the island of Santo this week. We leave this Wednesday, which is Mark’s birthday! During the week of April 20th it rained every single day, all day. One day the temperature was in the 70s. The breeze from the ocean was incredible! Of course, the rain made the roads melt and there was lots of mud. The bonus, of course, was cooler temperatures. I believe we have hit the end of cyclone season — YAY! We a...