Rain, at last!

This past week, the rain we've all been praying for has come at last. After several day of heavy rain this week, the water restrictions in place for the past month or so, where we had water 5 days, no water 2 days, have been lifted. Hurray! Now, if we could just get some rain back in Utah...

The work continues here, we're working very hard and come home exhausted after work most nights. A couple of highlights since I last wrote:

We set up a new sisters apartment in Chiayi. Sister Yu found this nice furnished place, but some of the furnishings were not missionary friendly, such as double beds. We collected single mattresses, study desks, a dryer, bedding, and a few other things from the storage room and spent the day getting the apartment ready for three (temporarily) sisters. Using three mismatched bases (2 too small and 1 too large) from the double beds, it turned out pretty nicely, we thought. Here's a pic of the finished bedroom:

May 28th was our 38th anniversary, and we celebrated with steak and baked potatoes, and fresh corn on the cob, which was grown in Brother Yu's garden. They are so kind to us! We haven't been able to find sour cream here, so we substituted cream cheese. Meh. Anyway, we noticed that, on this 38th anniversary, our family has grown to 38 people! With Melissa expecting #39 (grandchild #23), Sister Wells asked who wanted to sign up for #40... crickets. haha

We also had a transfer, which is three pretty intense days: move day, arriving missionaries day, and departing missionaries day. We said good by to Elder Anderson, one of our office elders/APs, as well as Sisters Burke and Lo, who stayed with us several days.

One of my responsibilities is to procure and arrange for shipment of missionary bicycles. This turns out to be more complicated than one would expect. After lots of re-do's on the move order, we just have one bike still lost somewhere in Taiwan. Here's a picture of some of the bikes I worked on this transfer:

We had some fun getting Sister Burke off - she needed a Covid test in order to travel to the USA, but we found that our oh-so-convenient "across the street" hospital wasn't offering Covid tests anymore. So Sister Wells found another hospital which would do it, but they only took 40 a day and opened at 8:00 am. So, we drove her and Sister Lo to the hospital at 7:15 am. Haha - they weren't even close to getting in. The next day, we dropped her off at 4:15 am, and she was #11 (!). We were blessed to have calculated an extra "just in case anything goes wrong" day into the plan.

Another "transfer" of sorts happened, in addition. The 2 Elders and 2 Sisters in quarantine got out, and we were asked to take them to the train station. No big deal, right? Right, unless you get mixed up on who is going in the morning and who is going in the afternoon. We realized our mistake just about the time it was too late to correct it. We drove (safely, but quickly) to the Elders house and threw their luggage in the van and drove (safely, but quickly) to the train station. Miraculously, we got them there with plenty of time (2 minutes!) to spare. The Sister's run to the train station was a cake-walk after that. We even had time to take a photo of Sister Staker and Sister Tsai:

Needless to say, we were pretty stressed out and exhausted at the end of that day!

Here's a pic of our meetinghouse, just so you can envision "here" a bit more. The hospital I mentioned is on the right.

Of course, for the last few weeks, we haven't been meeting on Sunday, due to Covid Level 3 restrictions. Instead we've enjoyed hosting the nearby Beitun and (temporarily during quarantine) Nantun Sisters, as well as the departing sisters Burke and Lo. We had to have three sacrament meetings last week to accomodate them all, since there is a "5 person" limitation on indoor gatherings. This week we only had two meetings, since Sisters Burke and Lo have departed. Here's a picture of two of the sisters who met with us today, Sister Huang (one of our English Connect participants) and Sister Chung. We love them all!