February 2009

Dear Friends, Brethren and Family

Bula Vinaka from Fiji land.

The birds are singing, the sun is shining (for the moment), coconuts continue to rain down from the trees into our yard and pigs dug up holes in our back yard this morning. God is still in control!

LAST REPORT

When we wrote last there was a weather depression bearing down on Fiji. Prayers worked, it veered south. In the past few days a cyclone developed southwest of us but is no danger to us. We are in cyclone season until May and the forecast is for at least one substantial cyclone to hit the Fiji Isles before the season is over.
We have slowly been getting the house back to livable since we returned from New Zealand January 27th. I noticed a musty smell in the car after we got back and found that the song books that I keep and take to services at Sabeto in the boot (trunk) of the car had gotten soaked during one of the times the car went through deep water. They are dry and usable again. The good thing is that I have been reprinting the songbook and the not-so-pretty ones now were the first edition. The place we gather for services was under 3 feet of water during the flooding but has been cleaned up and is useable again.

The trip to New Zealand was like being in a time-warp. Talk about culture stress! We left in a torrential downpour wondering what the high water mark would be in the house when we returned. The mark in the first flooding on January 10th was 10 inches from the floor at the side door, 4 inches at the front door. Happily the mark was not raised!

TOUCH DOWN NEW ZEALAND

We landed in Auckland, New Zealand after the 3 hour flight from Nadi, Fiji. The sun was shining, the temperature 21C/70F, the humidity less than 45%. We soaked it in. We were taken to the rental car place, got a car and then drove off to Hamilton were we spent a couple of days just trying to get a handle on what had happened. We walked around and visited grocery stores and the Warehouse where we went further into culture stress. We ate at Pizza Hut but we have had much better! New Zealand is being populated by people from China, Tonga, Samoa, etc. New commercial building, large expensive cars, lots more new houses.......... Prices: wow! mind blowing! Lettuce was selling for $1.49 (less than $1 US) a head whereas we were paying $14 per kilogram in Fiji. Frosted flakes $4.50 a box in NZ/ $13.50 a box in Fiji. The cereal was scary as it has crunch when I ate it. I even bought some chocolate covered marshmallow Easter eggs. The sheer variety of items and price of these and the meat items was overwhelming. Second hand book shops..... even the regular book shops were affordable. We were overwhelmed by how many American named stores have sprung up in New Zealand. In 1986 there were only 3 McDonald's in NZ now there are over 300. There is Burger King, hardware stores and others. We especially enjoyed eating at the Subway stores.

We travelled from Hamilton and spent a night at Rotorua before travelling on to Tauranga. Tauranga was where we lived for over 9 years in 1980-90’s. We stayed with the Harnetts the few days we were in Tauranga. The Harnetts and McLeans took Kathy and me out to celebrate our 40th Wedding Anniversary on January 17th. I was especially refreshing to be with these two Godly families again. We were able to worship with the brethren at Otumoetai on Sunday and caught up with what had been going on there as well. Boy, not a few of them have gotten so much older! Can you believe it! The kids were not kids anymore.
On our way out of Tauranga we stopped to see Dick and Dee, fellow Americans who ran the “Stars and Stripes” restaurant. It was great seeing them and having an “American style breakfast” with them.

TRIP TRAVELLING

We drove to and then spent a few days with the Mark Willis family at a camping ground at Kai Wai lakes North of Auckland. The weather was somewhat rainy and the wind was cool. Kathy and I wore jackets and long trousers. The Willis’ were in tents and we stayed at a small lodge just up the road. We got together during the day and talked. It was good to be with them again.

From there we drove back to Auckland where we stayed and chilled (more like cooled) until we left to return to Fiji. We were able to worship with the Morningside group of Christians on Sunday morning. John Staiger is ministering there. There were a number of people who we knew and they knew us. It was a great reunion. They asked about the flooding in Fiji and the needs we might have. It was good to be able to hear and speak English for a whole two weeks! New Zealand is still such a beautiful country it was soul calming just driving though the countryside.

Samu and Mirama Rakai

One family in Auckland we caught up with was a Fijian family we had known from school days in Tauranga and then back in Fiji. They live in Auckland now and he has a grass cutting service, Samu and Mirama Rakai. Their kids are all grown up and Samu has a splash of grey in his hair now. He is still very interested in our proposed school in Fiji and we talked about his dreams of being a part of that in the future. We broke bread with them for lunch that Sunday. Sunday evening we hooked up with a group of American missionaries (Peters, Ely and Cherry) who were beginning a new work in the Northwest area of Auckland. We met for Bible study at a Starbucks, back to the Peters for communion and then out for tea at a local fast food place.

Well, the day came to return to Fiji and guess what it was doing, yep raining! We checked our bags and had to pay a bit for overweight. We had two extra bags loaded with second hands books, pretzels, (fresh) cereal, trail mix, chocolate covered marshmallow fish, rolls of self-adhesive book covering, paper towels, etc. It was well worth the extra shekels.

We arrived back to Fiji in the rain. Welcome home!

Since being back we have been able to get the house squared away somewhat. The first thing we had to do was get all the furniture out of the house which had gotten ruined by the flood water. The bed frames and shelf units came with the house and was made out of pressed wood. Our furniture which I had made out of red oak lumber was okay and just needed the mildew wiped off (white vinegar is the best to use). The floor then had to be scrapped, mopped and then mopped again. The office/laundry floor have to be sealed and painted after it was mopped out.

BACK TO CLEAN-UP

The sugar cane people finally cleaned the train track rails close to the house in preparation of the upcoming sugar cane season. Some of the dirt and rocks they scrapped out I got them to dump behind the house as fill. Dump they did and I have been slowly leveling it out, getting the huge rocks out and dragging the dead grass and bushes out of it. (A couple of hours a day only!) They also dug out the drainage ditch outside our fence but then left a small dam about 25 feet along in the ditch. We had a heavy rain the other afternoon 1.5 inches in half and hour. The water was flowing and then started backing up in the ditch, in the yard and flooding the back yard. The ditch will carry the water out even past the small dam. We will have temporary flooding but I do not anticipate flooding the house again. If so, we are out of here faster than Noah.

I put new guttering up on the front of the house which is doing a better job of getting the water away from the edge of the porch. The downpipes are now 6", they were 2", and when the rain was heavy the water flowed over the top of the guttering because it couldn't get down the pipes quick enough. I have build storage shelving to replace the shelf/cabinets that were ruined in the flooding. Mine are out of plywood not pressed board. The kitchen cabinets are next. I hope to just jack them up with a new 6" base with a new plywood bottom shelf. I had one can of the expand-o foam which I used to fill up the drainage holes I knocked in the walls to let the flood waters out. I put 1.25 inch poly pipes as drain pipes for the future and foamed them in. I forgot how much the foam expands. From the back of the house it looks like hemorrhoids. I guess I will have to trim it out and finish off with cement.

THE PIGS ARE BACK

The pigs (4) are back. They were in the yard yesterday morning at 6:30 am. This morning they were not here but they had dug up parts of the backyard sometime early this morning. I reported it to the police and the officer just got back after talking with Jim (the pig owner). The officer told Jim the police will kill the pigs the next time. Jim is supposed to come see me later today and have his boys fix the fence of his pigpen. We'll see! We have been having rain every afternoon and the ground is really soggy. The mosquitoes are in swarms and they are the dengue carrying kind. (stripped)
The digger that was digging out the sugar cane train tracks and the ditch behind our house knocked down a large tree limb across the road and with it our phone line. We were without a landline for a week and that included internet connection.

COMPUTER WOES!

One of my computers failed to come back on line on a Monday. I have been preparing more courses for the external correspondence school as well as material for Sunday morning. I tried every trick in the book to repair the hard drive so I can get the data off the drive and used a back up machine to try and get it to save something. I was not sure it would re-format and be usable but I needed the data. I had all my material for Sunday and the BCC work on it and for some reason I could not find a backup file. If I couldn't get the data I would have to redo all the BCC courses I am currently using. Oh, what fun!

After 18 hours I was able to resurrect the information on the HD that crashed. I had to rebuild the directory and then start it up in Unix mode to modify some files. I then had to take it out of the laptop and put it in an external case and that was hooked to my other machine which brought the files back. I even went so far as to email an outfit that recovers data. They wanted from $500-$1900 to recover data from the crashed drive. After more prayer and more patience, the Lord again provided. There will be more backups in the future!

WORLD BIBLE SCHOOL AND EXTENSION COURSES

We are continuing to advertise for World Bible School and our extension courses in the newspaper. We have received word that our WBS partners there in the United States are receiving new requests and we are still getting requests for new courses every week and the current students are still progressing through the lessons. An opportunity to get the courses advertised in all the local prisons is still a very real possibility.

The post flooding rebuilding is continuing throughout the country as well. What I have heard and read is that the NGO's and government have responded in a very positive way to getting aid where the people are most needful. There are cases of villages not receiving any aid yet who are cut off as roads are still a mess here. It was reported that over 176,000 people still had not received food rations two weeks after the flooding. It is a huge distribution problem with very few people to sort it out. However on the whole the needs are being met. Maybe not the greeds but the needs are! At the present time there seems to be ample finance to meet the needs that are here.

HELPING THOSE IN NEED

Kathy and I had been saving some of our older clothes and extra dishes and items for the time we would have a school built and the students might have need for such. One of the Christian ladies here was working with another lady giving out donated clothes and items to those they had found out were in great need due to total flood-out of their homes. So we were able to help her with the extra things we had.

For those of you who asked if we needed additional finance to help, thank you! To the best of my knowledge, none of the Christians here in Fiji (except maybe for Erisi who lost his wife in the flooding and he has been helped) have been displaced nor incurred sufficient losses to warrant substantial financial help to help them get back on their feet to survive the upcoming months. That is not to say the people here are not going through difficult times. That is also not to say that in three or four months time there will not be a need for food rations help until the gardens begin producing food for many families. Current news indicates that vegetables are starting to come back to the markets in sufficient quantity to meet the needs.

I know the people here struggle. The new basic wage rate came out this week:
Garment industry - F$1.36 per hour (current exchange rate = .73 USD per hour)
Other unskilled workers - F$1.65-2.08 per hour
Skilled workers - F$1.84-2.57 per hour
Minimum wage proposed F$172-175 a week. If you do the math that means a garment worker has to work over 126 hours to reach the minimum wage proposed. No wonder so many drink kava! There was even an ad in the Fiji Times for a Tradesman cabinet maker at F$4.00 per hour. Wow! Get rich I would not!

Thank you for your prayers and your finances.

Your seed-sowing brother and sister.

Tobey & Kathy

Quote for the Month:
"God is a missionary God. The Bible is a missionary book. The gospel is a missionary message. The church is a missionary institution. And when the church ceases to be missionary minded, it has denied its faith and betrayed its trust."

J. Herbert Kane
The Making of a Missionary,
2nd ed., p.1