A Life of Streiff

Wednesday June 10, 2009

This last week has been one of those frustrating weeks where we tried to get the work done but no one will get back to us. We have been told how slow and undependable the email is on the islands and I think we are experiencing it firsthand. We were asked to write a story about the first stake being formed in the Marshall Island this week. We had hoped to send it to the News paper there but wanted to include a nice photo or two. We asked someone up there to take a picture for us, which they did, but it came back of just the chapel and doesn’t have any people in it. News papers like people in them. We have worked hard on this project but it may never get printed. You just never know.
Our job is really depended on the information we can get from others and when we write stories for the newspaper we have to make sure it’s interesting, factual and of interest to the community. It makes it hard to write when we have never been to the area and can’t take some great shots of the event ourselves.

Thursday:
A member invited Paul and some of the other missionaries to go on a chartered fishing boat for half a day, out on the ocean. They left from a dock in Auckland and went out to some little islands not too far off shore. They could see our office the whole time they were fishing so it wasn’t like they were away from work at all. This according to Paule. Right after the anchored, Paul hook a nice Thresher Shark and jumped clear out of the water.

They said it was 5 or 6 feet long. He fought it for quite a while but it eventually broke his line. I guess he was still using the 10lb. test leader that he had put on it for trout. They were amazed at how long it kept it on there and really got it quite close to the boat before it broke off.

He then caught a couple of Red Snapper, which is what they went for, a star fish that they didn’t go for and a big 4foot long eel which they definitely didn’t go for.

He said it had really big teeth and was scary trying to get it off the line without getting your finger taken off. I guess it wasn’t much of a good fishing day for some of the others but they still had fun and it was a perfect day with lots of sunshine and no wind. We ate the snapper for dinner and it was so good, I wish we could catch those every day.
Saturday:
We slept in today, for a change, it felt so good. Then we decided to go find the black sand beach that some other couples had told us about. Elder Nally gave Paul some sort of directions to get us close and said we could find it once we got in the area. It was supposed to take about an hour so after four hours of driving we finally found it. The drive was really beautiful as are all drives on this island so it wasn’t so bad. The black sand beach is on the west side of the island where the wind always blows, and boy was it blowing.


I almost fell over just walking down the board walk to the beach overlook. And I wasn’t even chewing gum. The waves were very large and the beach very long and deserted. The sun was just going down by then and it started to get very cold so we didn’t stay too long and then headed home. Since we now knew where we were, it only took about 35 or 40 minutes to get home. Thank goodness for that.




This was a sand project that an artist had people help with. They were digging between strings and making some kind of a world looking thing. All that work that would be under water in 6 hours.
Monday:
Typical day at work, no one answers our emails so the work just drags along. We’re still trying to get the article finished about the new Stake in the Marshal Islands. Hope it comes together soon as the dead line is fast approaching.

( Pacific Area Presidency and the senior couples )

Monday is family night when the senior couples get together. We were in charge this week and since the Nally’s are going home on Thursday, we wanted to do something fun. So, we all went bowling. What a bunch of sorry bowlers. Most of the scores were well under 100 but a few did make it over the top. My high score was 108 and Paul got a 128 on his second game. I think only one person got something higher than that.

We really had a great time and everyone including the Area Presidency seemed to have a great time too. When the President saw Paul’s and my high scores, he said that now he knows where we spend our time when not at our desks. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that we’re really at the Burger King. Afterwards we returned to the office and ate chocolate cake with ice cream and delicious hot butter sauce that we had prepared. Everyone loved it and Paul and I have a few left over’s to pig out on the rest of the week, yum, yum