New Zealand Hamilton Mission

We brought in 21 missionaries 1 1/2 weeks ago, and 13 more this past week. .  Things went pretty smoothly.  These missionaries bring our total force up to about 130 missionaries!  Missionary work is basically back to normal here in New Zealand, as we no longer have Covid restrictions.  All of our new incoming missionaries are New Zealand citizens. We've just officially hit the beginning of winter here.  We get lots of rain, but there are nice sunny days as well.  Bike rides and walks help us avoid cabin fever.  We are very blessed to have fairly mild winters compared to what we're used to in Utah. Our work days are consumed with phone calls, answering texts and emails, ordering supplies, maintaining flats with all their essential needs, mentoring missionaries, paper work for missionaries, and etc.  Thursday, we drove to Tauranga to help missionaries clean all the walls in their home, and to help them with some other Jobs.  We also had th...

Last Friday we passed another milestone- one year in Aotearoa-"Land of the Long White Cloud".  The Maori name refers to cloud formations that helped navigate early Polynesians to the Island.  This time of year, the island is covered by clouds much of the time.  We remember when we arrived to New Zealand, a year ago, it was indeed shrouded by clouds.  We have received some rain almost every day for the past couple of weeks.  We had 3 consecutive days of frost on the car last week, reminding us that winter is again near.  Luckily, between the storms we have been able to get out for walks and bike rides- much needed because of the intensity of the past weeks and into the next 3 weeks. We received on Wednesday, the first 13 of our influx of 73 missionaries slated to arrive in the next few weeks.  Not as many as we expected because of challenges arranging travel.  We will make up for it with 26 likely to come this week.  We have come to learn th...

New Zealand Temple (Undergoing Renovation)

As of Friday, we are able to gather in groups of 100 or less.  We have two zone conferences now scheduled for Tuesday and Thursday.    A caterer who is a member of the Church will prepare box lunches for us.  We have just heard that we will receive 75 missionaries over the next four weeks.  These are missionaries who are from New Zealand and have returned home from their overseas mission and have been temporarily reassigned to our mission.  Some have just finished remote MTC training, so they are just beginning to serve. We've been having Zoom sacrament programs with our ward the last few weeks.  They are thirty minutes long and consist of music recordings by the Tabernacle Choir and speakers from the congregation.  Today we heard from Brother Murray who shared his story of his conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.   His mother had just passed away at the time and he needed answers to the questions he had as t...

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...