A bit cooler... Yea!

Preparing a traditional greeting for Elder Bednar, his wife and the Meurs

May through October is winter here in Vanuatu, or as they call it the “dry season”.  That means it is about 82 degrees with 75% humidity instead of 90 degrees with 95% humidity. The summer or “wet season” is November through April. During the summer, “wet season” we get rivers of water/rain on most days, and the winter, “dry season” we still get rain but it’s much less intense. We are grateful for the cooler breeze and cooler days!

On our morning walk seeing the beautiful sunrise at the ocean.

Things have taken a turn with the construction Joe was originally going to participate in because of some policy changes. His role will be more observatory, as the eyes and ears of the mission regarding the new builds. They are building new missionary quarters as well as chapels. One of the huge struggles here is the maintenance of all existing properties. The humidity, and other harsh conditions coupled with the culture, things deteriorate quickly. This is where our focus has shifted and where we can do the most good.

Elder Furia, from Italy who worked with the Ferrara's
who are serving their mission in his family's ward. Small world!

Most of our time is spent managing 52 properties on 4 different islands of Vanuatu. In past posts I have shared the crazy conditions and lack of modern facilities and how we are moving forward to make things as good as possible. We love seeing and being able to connect with the missionaries in all of these places and feel like the lasting effect of “building people” is more eternal than a physical building, although both are important.

Adorable

One of the very difficult things we are faced with is, many of the problems are incredibly complicated to fix or are completely out of our control. For example there is a village area called Saet Siwi on the island of Tanna that has a church owned missionary quarter. It is up the mountain and is one of the places we literally had to hike to while there a month ago. The chief in the village will not fix the roads so you can only drive so far and then have to hike the rest of the way. The missionaries teaching area is the whole mountain area so they hike an hour and a half just to get to their main area. Their refrigerator (one of the few) stopped working, and we just got a call that all water in the whole village area is not working. Their extra water tank is broken so they have no water… at all. Water trucks can’t get up there because of the roads so they are hiking to bring water back up the mountain for drinking in the mean time.  Both missionaries happen to be these sweet American boys. We probably will need to move them into a different location until these issues can be worked out. In general, these are complicated circumstances with solutions that take a long time to work out.

Matching dresses and ties... It's a Vanuatu thing :)

We get these kinds of calls all the time. Both of us are very goal oriented people who work at always creating solutions to challenges and we have never experienced anything like this in our lives. I’ve said it before, but the missionaries are amazing and very tough. They just dig in and do what they need to do.


The rugged trucks we all drive are meant for the crazy roads here. A few missionaries were driving on a road they had been on many times and there had been one of the downpour river water rains I was talking about. It’s not possible to speed, even if you wanted to. They didn’t know that there had been a landslide on the other side of this hill. When they got over the hill there was a huge drop off and rolled the truck. Missionaries were fine, but it totaled the Land Cruiser.

Flip flops, or no shoes at all :)

To say that we are experiencing opposition would not be an adequate explanation. At times it feels as though the gates of hell have opened its mouth and is trying to swallow all of Vanuatu. We did get another 6.0 earthquake the other day that woke us up out of a dead sleep. No damage and we didn’t lose power or water so we went on with our day.

The children made signs welcoming Elder Bednar

With all of the challenges there are also bright shining moments and miracles. One of those happened this week when Elder David A. Bednar, a member of the twelve apostles and his wife came and visited Vanuatu. There was a member meeting for the whole community with 2000 people in attendance. The next morning with only 150 of us, we had an incredible 3 hour meeting with the Bednar’s and the missionaries. It felt like 30 minutes. Most of it was discussion style where anyone could ask him questions. Elder and Sister Meurs (The president of the Pacific Area of the church, located in New Zealand) also spoke and participated in the discussion. It was so amazing!


Bednars and Meurs
His focus was on the transformative power of faith in Jesus Christ and our faith and conversion to His gospel. “The whole gospel purpose is for us to change. The Savior doesn’t want to just prune us… He wants us new in Him”. He talked about Moses and the children of Israel as they were fleeing slavery in Egypt and headed to the Red Sea that parted. It wasn’t until they walked into the water (faith is action) that the water started to part. We don’t know how deep they were in the water before the sea began to part, but usually God takes us to the edge… whatever the edge is for us before the miracle happens. “Often times we pray with a shopping list, and expect it by 4:00pm”. He said, “Stop praying for what you want and start praying for what HE wants you to do, with the intention to act.”

Faith in action truly dispels fear and bring peace. 


It has been 7 months of uncertainty, and situations I didn’t even know existed. It has felt like one gigantic test of “lets see what happens next, and how are you going to handle this one”. It is pretty safe to assume that the rest of this mission will be more of the same in different ways. We pray every day to know what God wants us to do and to be led in how to handle different situations and solve the challenges that come up.


I know that God answers prayers and that miracles are real. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to do our part or that sometimes it doesn’t feel like it or we can’t see it in the moment. Very often, the clarity comes after as we see the Lords hand in the process. I’m grateful for his grace and unfailing love in our imperfectness and know that all is in Gods perfect timing…. and that is enough.


We love an miss you all,

The Kwans

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