New Zealand Hamilton Mission

We passed a milestone on our mission this week and we can hardly believe it.  As of Wednesday past, we have been on our mission for 1 year and in a few days we will have been in New Zealand for a year.  The time has passed incredibly fast.  At the same time it seems so long ago that we were living in West Bountiful.  The mission life has become so much the normal for us that our previous life seems almost like a dream.  New Zealand has become our home and everything is comfortably familiar to us.  Of course we think of and miss our friends and family but this is where we need to be at this time. After a few days of adjustment, we are back into the routines of a busy mission.  With sending so many missionaries home due to Covid, it has allowed me to do some things with our flats I have wanted to do since taking over as housing coordinator.  That is to evaluate each flat and clean and upgrade them as much as possible.  We have removed literal...

Our organized linen closet—a task completed during lockdown Model Plane Club—an activity during lockdown

Kia Ora! We moved back into the mission office Thursday, after being home for almost two months.  We started off with a bang when we received 5 missionaries from Auckland, New Zealand on Friday morning!  That was combined with a major transfer among our missionaries.  Elder Folland and Elder Clayton were extremely busy trying to get keys and phone SIM cards to the missionaries.  We couldn’t have the missionaries come into the office, and most of our missionaries here right now don’t drive.  Amazingly, things went well with few issues! Elder Folland and President Erekson did 35 miles of biking yesterday while Sister Erekson and I had lunch at the mall and visited for a couple of hours.  We had planned to bike (not 35 miles!-haha), but Sister Erekson had some knee pain so we opted out.  We had the opportunity to drive one of our senior couples to the airport yesterday.  We had a nice dinner in Auckland before dropping them off at the airport. ...

Well,  we wish we had some wonderful new developments to report on since last week but in reality, not much as changed.  We were looking forward to last Tuesday when the New Zealand government announced what would happen at the end of the period of Level 4 restriction.   Well, we did in fact move to Level 3 restrictions but as it was explained what that would mean, we realized our day to day life would change very little.  We are required to stay in our "bubble" and continue physical distancing of at least 6 feet.  We are still restricted on how far we can travel from home to staying within our region.  Two things did change, for which we are grateful.   Restaurants can now sell take out food and on the first day of level 3 we got take away fish and chips from our favorite joint.  It tasted so good!  The other change is we can go to the beach if it is no more than 45 minutes away.  Luckily, Raglan beach is exactly 45 minutes aw...