June Hong Kong Branch and Asia Area Actvities

We spent a week in Taiwan in June. (see following four blogs). But other things also happened in our Island II Church Branch and in the Asia Area Office. This blog captures some of these events that happene to us in June.

Elder Smith Turns 77 years old


Elder Smith's birthday was on Sunday, June 14. In the branch, a group home teaching lesson is given after the block meeting on the 2nd and 4th Sundays of each month. June 14 was the 2nd Sunday, so after Elder and Sister Smith gave the home teaching lesson on prayer, the group members sprung a birthday party on him. These pictures show the fun these wonderful sisters and one brother provided for the occasion.

Eight wonderful sisters try to take the place of five wonderful daughters, at least for one day. Back row, l to r: Sisters Dioneta, Paz, Luz,Violeta,Trinidad. Front row: Sisters Sally, Julie and Gloria T.

Our one Elder, Brother Noel, has a great voice. The group prepared a song for Elder Smith sung by Noel with vocal accompaniment from the sisters. "You Lift Me Up".


Sister Trinidad baked this delicious German Chocolate cake. It went fast. They also had fried chicken pieces and ice cream to go with the cake.



Elder Smith tried to get the cake for himself, but that didn't work.

Happy Birthday sung Philippine style. The candles were in the shape of two "7"s

Sister Smith caught the group in this great picture.

Goodbye to Asia Area President Hallstrom and Sister Hallstrom

This month we said farewell to our Area President, Elder Donald Hallstrom. He was called to be one of the Seven Presidents of the Seventy at the April General Conference and moved with his wife back to Utah in June. We had several events to say goodbye including a Devotional, a lunch at the building for all of the staff and missionaries in the Asia Area Administration Building (about 100), a Temple day with the full time missionaries and a Chinese dinner with the missionaries that evening in a wonderful restaurant across the harbor in Kowloon.

This is a picture of the Area Presidency (Elder and Sister Hallstrom are in the middle of the first row) and the Welfare Services Division including three couple missionaries (Smith, Woolsey, Gibbons), Stanley Wan, the Area Welfare Manager, and Jaymi Wong, the Welfare Secretary. Asia Area 1st Counselor, Elder Perkins on the left of the front row, will be our new Asia Area President. On the right of the Hallstroms are Elder and Sister Watson, 2nd Counselor, and Brother and Sister Terry Oakes, the Asia Area Director of Temporal Affairs. Brother Oakes is also the President of the Island II branch in which Elder Smith serves as the 2nd Counselor.

This is a picture of the Area Presidency with the full time missionary couples in the Asia Administrationi Building (10 couples) plus Elder and Sister Kau from the Taiwan Mission office and Sister Van Dam, Mission Mother. President Val Dam was not present for the picture.

UPS Delivery Hong Kong style

Every morning the sidewalk on the street adjacent to our office building is full of UPS and FedEx deliveries for the Wan Chai Hong Kong area. The wonderful thing is that the boxes get to their proper destination!! Our daughter, Cindy, has sent several boxes to us while we've been here. The record time for the mail was a box mailed on Friday US time arriving at our office on Monday Hong Kong time. It's hard to do that well from one US destination to another.

Is our box there???

Victoria Harbor Laser Light Show

Every night at 8 p.m. the buildings on both sides of the Victoria Harbor are lit up to the accompaniment of an orchestra background that is broadcast on both the Hong Kong Island Central Harbor and the Kowloon Harbor. Viewers line the shore on both sides of the harbor to view the show, but a more spectacular view can be had on a boat in the harbor itself. The mission couples took such a trip in June. I really neeeded a video clip to show this, but a few still pictures will have to do. Several buildings have flashing lights placed on the building exterior that go on an off with the music. The tall building with the triangular white stripes light up in interesting sequences. The stripes are really lights that turn on and off in sections as the music is played. In addition, strobe laser lights are flashed across the water. It is about a 15 minute dsiplay. We were impressed.

The Hong Kong Island skyline with the Central Piers in the foreground.

A full moon evening. Even without the show, many of the buildings have blazing lights with the building names in lights. A very colorful city.

Family Home Evening Break the Fast Dinner in June.

Every Fast Sunday, the five branch home teaching groups hold a group Family Home Evening followed by a "Break the Fast" dinner. The various groups take turns fixing a dinner for 100 people. June was again our group's turn.

The menu for today was chicken ala king. Most of the sisters are great cooks because that is their job as domestic servants. They prepare this dinner both before and after the block meetings.

They fixed a lot of food. There was even some left over!!

The tables and chairs ae up ready to be used.

We even provided some entertainment with the help of our two guitarist brothers Noel and Isisdro. These are very popular Elders.

Preach my Gospel Bowl for District Branches

Under the direction of Mission President Van Dam, each of the nine units in the International District in Hong Kong held a Preach My Gospel Bowl. Each unit has four participants. They draw questions about the Preach My Gospel missionary book and have one minute to answer it correctly. Points were awarded if the correct answer was given. Questions were true-false, multiple choice, or completion. The completion were the most difficult.

This was the group from Island II branch. They did well, but out of the five rounds they misse two difficult completion questions so they did not win.

The white boards were use to keep track of the scores for the six branches represented,

The eventual winners were these four sisters from the Macau Island branch. They were very excited about their win as you can tell from the photo. They went on to Mission-wide competition. I am not sure how they did.

Visit to Taiwan- June 8-12, 2009

Our June Welfare visit was to Taiwan, one of the countries we work with. Elder and Sister Sparrow are our Welfare Missionaries there. They are from Colorado Springs, Colorado and have been in Taiwan since August 2008. He is a retired Air Force officer and she is a special ed teacher. Four of their six children were born with some handicap, and Sister Sparrow has become an expert in many areas of special ed. Because Taiwan has a stronger LDS Church presence than any other of our Asian countries, they only have smaller humanitarian projects leaving most welfare work to the Stakes. The Sparrows work in all Welfare areas including employment and teaching English. The 50,000th member of the Church in Taiwan was recently baptized. There are ten stakes and a temple in the country. Part of our assignment was to visit with several Priesthood leaders on Welfare matters in Taipei. We also visited humanitarian project sites and spent a special morning at the the Chung Yi orphanage where our adopted grandaughter, Maya, live for the first 8 months of her life. We were able to spend time in the temple and attended an endowment and sealing session. We have posted four blogs about our visit. This blog is a general blog highighting the Service Center, Temple and Missionary offices which are all located next to each other. We also visited a chapel in Hsinchu (see map above) after a 30 minute travel on a bullet train. The other three blogs cover our visit to several projects and activities, the trip to the orphanage, and our visit to some of the cultural and historical places of Taipei. We had a very busy five days.




This was our first use of the Dragon Airlines. It was a colorful plane.

Most of the buildings in Taipei are not as tall as those in Hong Kong, but they are are very beautiful. The traffic flow is like America. They drive on the right. After 5 months of getting used to traffic traveling on the left, it was relearning experience for us in Taiwan

The skyline does show several tall buildingts.

The beautiful Taipei Taiwan Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We spent several hours inside on June 10.

Elder and Sister Sparrow greet us at the entrance to the Service Center. This is where they have their office. The building is adjacent to the Temple and houses five church units on Sunday. The building houses a Distribution Center, Taiwan church offices, and is used for missionary and English language teaching.

A very devoted couple. In spite of a serious health problem that Elder Sparrow experienced in the first few months of his mission, he continues to serve faithfully. He was a missionary here in the1960s. They love Taiwan.

The directory of Church offices in the Building. Elder and Sister Sparrow are on the 4th floor.

The beautiful offices of the Service Center Manager, Carl Liang. and his staff.

We met Ben Tsai, a building engineer who hopes to attend BYU for graduate studies.

The Taipei Taiwan mission offices are in this building across the street from the Service Center. We met President Nielson and enjoyed a lunch with the missionaries at a zone conference held in the Center.

Our training of Elder and Sister Sparrow and Carl Liang took place in this well-equipped Conference Room.

Elder and Sister Phillips serve as Public Affairs missionaries for Taiwan. They work closely with Elder and Sister Sparrow on humanitarian projects.

We tried a lot of local food on this trip. The Sparrows eat the local food most of the time. These are steamed pork dumplings. They are steamed in this reed-like covered dish.

We met the Temple President, President Walker. His father is a sealer in the Provo Temple. His father is 96 years old and still very active. We enjoyed having supper with President Walker and the Sparrows. His wife was in the United States to attend a family funeral.

We visited Hsinchu. To get there we rode this train. Because of its speed, it is called a bullet train.

A beautiful chapel in Hsinchu.

The Employment Resource Center for this part of Taiwan is housed on the ground floor of this building. It is very spacious and well-equipped.

Brother Wu is the Director of the ERS in Hsinchu. We had a good visit with him.

Work is exchanged between Sister Sparrow and Brother Wu.

Visits to Humanitarian Project Sites- Taipei Taiwan

Health Fair Puppet Show

One of the main purposes for visiting Taiwan as Asia Area Welfare Specialiasts was to view ongoing activities headed by Elder and Sister Sparrow, the Taiwan Welfare missionaries. The first activity was a puppet Health Fair presented to an elementary school, The Sparrows found pieces of a Health Fair puppet show in storage. It had been received in the year 2000. The missionaries had used it some in the years past, but it hadn't been used for several years. There was a script on a CD in Mandarin. A few of the puppets were broken or missing, so the Sparrows had ordered replacements and had 4,000 brochures printed that told about the puppets and the lessons being taught. Single missionaries trained as the puppeteers. There were 7 of them working this show. We walked the two blocks to the school from the service center. Some of the children were already in the gymnasium. They were all in uniforms with a different color top for each class. They all wore shorts since it is summer and very warm. They were almost perfect in behavior. They assembled in straight lines, and when they sat it was cross-legged with each child tucked up behind the next one. This group of 250 children were from kindergarten through third grade. We were deeply impressed with their deportment. No pushing, kicking or any sign of fighting.

The puppet stage had black curtains at two levels. The missionaries stood behind the stage. The music and script were on CD’s. The missionaries had to know how to manipulate the puppets so it would look like they were talking and show how excited they were while the music played. The puppets were very clever. They included a cigarette, an octupus representing addiction, a bottle of liquor, a nurse, men, women and children; about 40 puppets in all. There are about ten parts to the show. The missionaries have learned four. They included two on smoking, and one each on washing hands and liquor and drug addiction. Between each little play the leader had the children raise their hands in response to a question and Brother Phillips, the Public Affairs missionary, handed out small church imprinted pens. The children watched intently, laughed some and applauded at the end. The brochures were handed out. The missionaries came out from behind the screens and "high-fived" the students as they quietly filed out of the gymnasium.

English Teaching on Wednesday Nights

Every Wednesday night, the single and couple missionaries hold free English language lessons. They have five separate classes. The Sparrows teach an advanced class. They are assisted by a pair of young missionaries who teach a moral value lesson while they teach English. We attended the class with nine students, helped with the breakout groups, and Sister Smith told them about us. About half of the attendees are members of the Church.

Tonight's lesson was on adjectives and adverbs.

Students in the advanced English class. The sister in the foreground is Ivy and is an artist. We had a good visit with her and she sent us an email thanking us for teaching her.

Tzu Chi Recycling Center

On Thursday morning we visited three sites where we had participated in humanitarian projects. The first was the Tzu Chi Neihu Recycling Center. Tzu Chi was founded by a Buddhist female monk in 1966 who is dedicating her life to helping preserve the environment and help aged, disabled and poor to have meaningful lives. Since its organization 40 years ago, this charitable organization has gone world-wide, has its own international TV station, and operates in the recycling area, education, health care etc. We visited their large recycling center. We were amazed at what we observed. About 100 volunteers, most of them elderly, were sorting plastic bottles, clothing, paper into five categories, etc. Many come every day at the invitation of the TV programs. Volunteers also come and cook food for the noon meal for the volunteers. We observed cooking going on, sorting, getting items ready to sell etc. We spent about an hour and could have spent more. Our missionaries come four hours a week to help and serve. Two of them joined us as we toured the facilities.

The sign describes the vast network that Tzu Chi has developed. There are recycling centers in California and Washington in the United States.

These volunteers are preparing lunch. It is 10:15 a.m.

Paper is sorted into 5 caegories. The top category is white with no writing. Here volunteers are cutting away the writing on pieces of paper so the paper will be classified at the highest level.

They recycle almost anything. Paper, plastic, bottles, electronic equipment, clothing, metal. They disassemble appliances to retain the valuable parts. Good clothing is sold. They are a combination of Deseret Industries and a recycling plant. Here sorting is going on with paper, cardboard, etc.

Sister Smith visiting (smiling) with one of the volunteers. A young missionary volunteer looks on. Six missionaries come 2-3 hours each week for some of their service. She was a very happy volunteer

There are over 100 collection points in Taipei. Trucks pick up the items. Everyone in Taiwan must sort their garbage before it will be picked up. Here the plastic bottles are segregated by color. They will be transformed into fibers for the making of blankets. The blankets are used in the hospital part of the organization. LDS Charities is the name we use for humanitarian work in several of these countries. We donated baby blankets that church members had made to a hospital as part of a humanitarian project.

This exhibit shows the transformation of a plastic bottle into a blanket. The bottle is crushed, pulverized into crystals, treated to create filaments of fibre and made into the blankets.

Folding material made from plastic bottles.

The finished product!!

A great mop made from plastic bottles. The clothes behind us were also made from the bottle fabric.

Harmony Homes HIV/AIDS Orphange

From the Recycling Center we drove for thirty minutes to the Harmony Homes HIV orphanage where we did a Stake Initiative as part of a young man’s eagle project. They made the roof area of the orphanage into a play area by cleaning the floor, painting a highway on the floor, painting the walls, and building two sandboxes. We took lots of pictures and were treated warmly by the staff. The home is perched on a rock and is accessible only by long stairs. The Sparrows hope to do another project with an adult HIV group that live in a Harmony Homes shelter.

Sisters Smith and Sparrows climb the long stairs to reach the orphanage.

Most of the older children were in school while we were there. This room has plastic interlocking colorful blocks on the walls and floor. A fun place to play.

One of two sand boxes made for the children as part of an LDS Scout Eagle Project

The play area on the roof of the orphanage. The man on the right is the Taiwan Service Center Manager and a Stake President, Carl Liang. He was our chauffer today.

Creatively painted walls. Sister Sparrow got a baby to hold throughout the visit.

Institute for the Blind of Taiwan

Our next stop was the Institute for the Blind. This is one of two centers in Taiwan for blind adult training. They bring students in for 8 months of training. They live in an campus dormitory and learn such skills as massage therapy, pottery, cooking, making Braille books, learning to make beds, eat meals, maneuver without a dog etc. They also have several dogs in training. They had a great need for better dorm furniture and that was what our project provided. New furniture consisted of beds, chairs, desks, clothes cupboards, and tables. We furnished 14 rooms with two sets in each room. We visited the dorms and the training facilities. They were very impressive. We had personnel take us around the complex. They have strips on the sidewalk that tell the blind when a corner is coming. Parallel strips mean you can keep going. Dots mean there is a corner. The Stake in the area assisted by helping tear out the old furniture, painting walls inside and out, assembling tables and moving in the new furniture. The students were sent home for a month while the renovation took place. Because the Church had this project, other charitable organizations helped with other parts of the complex such as a new laundry for the sheets we furnished, more equipment for training etc. They even had a wall with handprints made with water based paint from the volunteers. We saw Elder and Sister Sparrow’s prints prominently displayed. The Institute was very appreciative of our contribution
.

Elder Sparrow and Sister Smith at the entrance to the complex.

Two of the personnel that operate the Institute with their visitors. Carl Liang is on the left.

The classroom building was painted by the stake members. These rooms are for training in pottery, massage therapy, housekeeping skills, etc. The building in the rear is the dormitory where we furnished the new furnitire.

The volunteers who painted left their handprints on this Donation Wall. The church members painted the dormitory walls as well.

The pottery room. A great vocation for the blind who can make pottery by feel.

Beautiful guide dogs being trained.

Some of the old furniture. Church volunteers pulled out the old furniture, assembled the new and installed it into the rooms. Old metal bunk beds were donated to a homeless shelter. They were dangerous for blind students to use because of height. The students were not allowed to use the top bunks.

These strips are on the sidewalks of Hong Kong. The raised dots mean a corner or a stop. The raised strips indicate you can continue going ahead. The Church youth installed the dorm strips.

A new desk, chair and bed.

A new wardrobe and shelf component. They had nothing like this before

The furniture in the old lunch room was high stools and small tables. With these tables and 4 chairs, three blind students and one faculty member can enjoy lunch together and the students can learn how to manipulate eating. Many of these students come partially blind having contracted a disease such as diabetes. They are trained so that as their eyesight fails them, theyare able to cope and remain more self reliant.

These were all great examples of the Church Welfare Program in Action.