Tongan Update, 19 April 2008, Whistle While You Work
In Walt Disney’s film, “Snow White,” there are seven dwarfs who march off to the diamond mines singing “Whistle While You Work.” Well, we’ve been doing a lot of whistling here. We decided we needed to super clean all the missionary houses so we proclaimed an official “Super Clean Day.” Actually we proclaimed four “Super Clean Days” because there are four mission zones on this island, and we could only clean one zone in a day.
First of all, we had to get ourselves organized. Each zone has three districts, and each district has three houses, and each house has two missionaries. We arranged for a senior couple to go with each district leader, pick up the missionaries in their district, and everyone had to help clean each others’ houses. OK, that being done, off to work we go, “hi ho, hi ho.”
Our first “Super Clean Day” was rained out. Everyone was ready, but the skies unloaded buckets of water. There was no way we could clean because the missionaries needed to take everything out of their houses so we could scrub floors, ceilings,
walls, windows, showers, toilets (yuck), wash sheets and drapes, and pick up the trash outside their places. However, there were a lot of happy missionaries that rainy day, but we were only postponing the inevitable. We went to work the next week even though some missionaries complained that they were sick (yea, right!), and we lost most of the senior couples.
By the fourth zone’s “Super Clean Day,” it was Elder Thompson, the APs, and I leading the troops into action.
Actually, this was a huge undertaking to say the least. Some of the houses were in terrible condition—mold, ground-in dirt, filthy bathroom floors, etc. Thank goodness the houses are small, and we had rubber gloves! I don’t know how many gallons of bleach we used.We thought we would have some “attitude” from a few of our big Tongan missionaries, but we were happily surprised. Almost everyone seemed to enjoy seeing their own house transform to smelling and looking good—sparkling like the jewels mined by the dwarfs. While the Elders and Sisters were working, they would sing and laugh; no one whistled. I told them that they weren’t working hard enough if they were having that much fun. It turned out to be a very successful project. As we were driving the last two Elders home, Elder Me’ahala asked what we thought of Tonga. We told him we loved Tonga and our Mission here. He followed up by saying, “We love you guys too.” Oh, what a nice thing to say, and it sounded sincere—a wonderful payback after all that hard work!
Back to “Snow White”...if the missionaries were going to rename Elder Thompson, John thought they would call him “Grumpy” because he kept those rascals on task during the cleaning sessions.
Is there a dwarf named “Tired?” That’s me! This project wore me out. I’m too exhausted to even try to whistle.
‘Ofa ‘atu, John and Diane
1 comment:
I love seeing pictures to go with the stories. I knew that cleaning didn't sound like fun, it doesn't look like much fun either. But it must feel good to have it done.
We finally opened the package you sent. We kept forgetting to take it to family night. It has been killing Ty to have it sitting here and not being able to open it. He finally got to open it and he loved it! The little bags with sea shells were so cute. Ty keeps coming to me with them and asking which one is the bumpiest, which one is the smallest........, he is really good at picking them all out. Thank you so much for sending us a little piece of Tonga. We loved it!
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