Expanding our Work

Our work on Tonga has been put on hold and our focus for the next couple of weeks will be on the 2500 African Oral Genealogies. These come from both Ghana and Nigeria and are a little different than the Tongan Orals and will hopefully go a little faster. We are very excited to get these online now. There is a great interest in Africa to record these histories before the "storytellers" die. The "storytellers" are those designated to keep in their minds the lineage of the tribe. We heard a statement recently that "when a storyteller dies, a library is burned". In some places the young men are moving into the large cities to find work. The life of a "storyteller" is one of daily working to memorize the history and lineage of the tribe members, some which go back as far as 60 generations. It is amazing. We are so excited to be involved in a small way to make these records available online.

The Church organization is very careful to make sure that the records are accurate. They are written down as they are told and then typed up and read back to the "storyteller" who then verifies the accuracy of the record and gives permission for it to be published, usually with a thumbprint as the signature on the permissions page. All of this is done after going through the tribal chief who has to give permission to the "storyteller" to share the lineage. It is a marvelous work.

Like most of the country we have been very cold here although unlike most of the country, we have not had snow in the valley, just the terrible air pollution. Monday afternoon Ed was quite tired so he left about 3:00pm to take a nap before going out to dinner with several missionary couples. When I left to go home about 4:45pm I was very surprised at how cold it was. It was much colder than it had been at 6:15am when we left the apartment and the wind had picked up. We went to dinner at the Bohemian Brewery (yes, that was funny for 8 missionaries...)for some good German food and by the time we returned home it was 14 degrees! I wondered what it would be like the rest of the week. I was not disappointed with the change. On Wednesday morning we left the apartment and it was 1 degree with a wind chill that made it feel like -12 degrees. It was soooo cold! What was funny to us was the next morning. It was 7 degrees and felt like -5 (all of this is according to weather.com at 6:00am each day)but it was so much warmer than the day before we didn't really feel it! It's amazing what we can get used to, isn't it?

We called our home and found out that school was canceled for Friday in advance of the day because of predicted snow. How funny. But, we did have a pipe burst at our house. Fortunately it was an outside pipe and we have an alert neighbor who turned off the "geyser" we had going in our front yard. Our girls will get it fixed and all will be well. We are very blessed. One of our other missionaries had a pipe burst in her home before Christmas and the water did a lot of damage because no one lives in her house. We are grateful we have family living in ours and friends who are willing to help them too.

We don't watch much news, but we have been concerned about Egypt. We met so many wonderful people there and we worry about their safety now and their lives in the future. The world is in an interesting time. With so much sadness and uncertainty in the world, I am grateful for the peace and joy I feel from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We had the following story shared by Pres. and Sister Boye of the Mission Presidency. I hope you have the time to read it even if you have read it before. It is one of the good ones.

After one of his lectures in London Dr. Louis Agassiz, a distinguished naturalist, encountered an obscure spinster woman who insisted that she was uneducated. In response to her complaint, he replied:
“What do you do?”
“I am single and help my sister run a boardinghouse.”
“What do you do?” he asked.
“I skin potatoes and chop onions.”
He said, “Madam, where do you sit during these homely duties?”
“On the bottom step of the kitchen stairs.”
“Where do your feet rest?”
“On the glazed brick.”
“What is glazed brick?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
He said, “How long have you been sitting there?”
She said, “Fifteen years.”
“Madam, here is my personal card,” said Dr. Agassiz. “Would you kindly write me a letter concerning the nature of a glazed brick?”
She took him seriously. She went home and explored the dictionary and discovered that a brick was a piece of baked clay. That definition seemed too simple to send to Dr. Agassiz, so she went to the library and discovered that a glazed brick is
vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate. She didn’t know what that meant, but she was curious and found out. She took the word vitrified and read all she could find about it. She moved out of the basement of her life and into a new world
on the wings of “vitrified.” And having started, she took the word hydrous, studied geology, and learned about clay beds formed at the start of the world. One afternoon she went to a brickyard, where she studied about the more than 120 kinds of
bricks and tiles. Then she sat down and wrote 36 pages on the subject of glazed brick and tile, which she mailed to Dr. Agassiz. Back came the letter from Dr. Agassiz: “Dear Madam, this is the best article I have ever seen on the subject. If you will kindly change the three words marked with asterisks, I will have it published and pay you for it.”
A short time later there came a letter with $250; and penciled on the bottom of this letter was this query: “What was under those bricks?”
She had learned the value of time and answered with a single word: “Ants.”
He wrote back and said, “Tell me about the ants.”
She began to study ants. She found there were between 1800 and 2500 different kinds. There are ants so tiny you could put three head-to-head on a pin ; ants an inch long that march in solid armies half a mile wide; ants that are blind; and ants that get wings just prior to their death. After deep study, the spinster sat down and wrote Dr. Agassiz 360 pages on the subject. He published it as a book and sent her the money. The spinster used the money to travel the world, visiting all the lands of her dreams.
The lesson for us -
As you read the scriptures, search the scriptures, study the scriptures, delve deeper, and ponder longer. “….seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom, seek learning even by study and also by faith… (DC 109:7.)

I am so happy for the freedom to learn.