Tongan Update, 06 Nov 2008, We’re All Shook Up

We are “all shook up!”

We experienced an earthquake while we were at a Fireside with President McMurray and the other senior missionaries last Sunday night. We felt the house shift and saw the curtains in the living room sway from side to side. We looked at each other and rolled our eyes, but that was about it!

What is really shaking us up is…our good friends and fellow-missionaries, Elder and Sister Embley, are returning to their home in Salt Lake City.

They were called to a 23 months education mission where they have been training teachers to become college certified. So…adios…another one bites the dust…that leaves in Tonga two plangi missionary couples, us and the Garretts.

..but… reinforcements are on the way. Three more couples are scheduled to arrive here within the next couple of months. We used to panic and felt deserted when we’d drive people to the Fua’amotu Airport

and then watch them get on a plane heading anywhere. Now we have been here long enough that we know we are going to be OK! So…only our knees are shaking!

What do you think of this next experience? Elder Thompson and I had assignments in Ha’apai and Vava’u, and we had to leave our comfortable apartment in the mission complex for about a week.

Around midnight one night while we on one of the outer islands, Elder Kairi heard a door shut. He asked his companion, Elder Iketau, if he had heard it. He nodded so they silently slipped out into the courtyard to investigate. One carried a wooden mermaid statue for defense

and the other manned a shovel.

Then they heard rattling sounds by the back gate and proceeded in that direction.

The neighbor’s dogs, our Merry Men, were barking like crazy. As they were closing in on the source of noise by the gate, the elders sighted a figure precariously clutching onto the roof of the complex.

This person was trying to negotiate how he was going to swing himself down and into the courtyard of our complex. Another figure swung open the unlocked door into the complex from the carport.

An invasion was transpiring. Their goal, we think, was our vacant apartment. Word had gotten around that the Thompsons were gone!

Oh yes, the elders were shaking! What to do? They looked at their weapons of war, decided against them, then made a mad dash to the light switches and flipped them on. The beautiful light radiated throughout all the corners and curves of our mission complex, and…the invaders slithered away.

OOOOOoooooo…we’re all shook up!

‘Ofa ‘atu, Elder and Sister Thompson