One Year in the Field

 

This day one year ago we started our mission so we feel the need to make an entry in our blog today. We took this picture a couple of nights ago from the Kowloon side of Hong Kong Harbor. I placed a blue arrow pointing to the building where I had an office overlooking the harbor for three years from 1998 until 2001. We will leave for Jakarta on June 10th but it is nice to have a few days in Hong Kong to work with our Area Director and explore our old stomping ground. We had dinner with Allen and Jill Anderson on Saturday and Sunday we sang with the Victoria branch choir. There are still a few members here that we remember but the branch is mainly composed of new people now, which is to be expected after 22 years. There are now 29 senior missionaries here so that's also a lot of fun.

On Saturday morning we were able to attend a temple session in the Hong Kong temple. That is a rare thing for us because most of our service is in Indonesia and Malaysia where there are no temples as yet. 

Today we walked to a Dim Sum restaurant with Annie Wong, who is the Asia Area communications director and with whom we work closely on everything we do. In this picture we have finished lunch and stopped to buy a waffle filled with peanut butter and sweetened condensed milk. It was yummy. If anyone reading this thinks you might like to serve a communications mission like us we will need to be replaced in 6 months so contact us if you want to learn more about it.

It was kind of amazing but we went out to the Jade Market and as we walked through the aisles I said to Cheri, "I think that may be your Jade lady". 22 years ago Bianca was Cheri's goto person for buying freshwater pearl necklaces that would make great gifts when we went home in the summer. Turns out, she is still there after all these years. She is a sweet woman and she remembered us too. She has not changed, she still tried really hard to sell a jade necklace to Cheri.

One of the tough things about these moves is lugging around 1 and 1/2 years worth of clothing and personal items. It takes a couple of weeks for my back to recover each time we move. 

The day before we left Malaysia we finally found an evening to go to dinner with the van Cotts who are now living in Kuala Lumpur and who were in our branch in Hong Kong back in the day. It was great to see them and catch up on things. They took us to a wonderful Malay restaurant. 











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