Feb 14 07

February 14, 2007

Happy Valentine’s Day. We got a phone call from Ethan and Allison first thing this morning, so we certainly got to start our day right. But Ethan seemed more excited about the 100th day of school they celebrated yesterday than he was about Valentine’s Day today. Robert gave me some chocolate and an artificial rose that plays music and a nice card. I gave him a card. Tough to be the man in our society, isn’t it?

Last Sunday President Bonito finally sustained an activities coordinator. I had asked him for this position at least 2 months ago. Things move slowly on the rez but I was delighted that it got done. Her name is Shauna Henry. I’ve been trying to get activities going but President didn’t want to go around Irene, the Relief Society President. Well, a herd of wild horses couldn’t get any action out of Irene, so we decided if we called an activities chairman we could plan through her without offending Irene. So Shauna was sustained Sunday and Robert set her apart. We’re not sure that’s quite appropriate in real Mormon Land, but out here, where the counselors don’t come to church, we think the Lord will accept someone being set apart by just about anyone who holds the priesthood and actually attends church meetings. After church we set up a meeting to make a calendar at 10:00 this morning and Shauna actually came. She had also invited Irene, but that was a surprising (not) no-show. Maxine Bonito is Irene’s counselor, and as near as we can figure out she seems to be the only counselor. However, she’s still in Phoenix with the uncle who is in the hospital.

So Shauna and I started the meeting here and Robert went up to get the mail. Guess who he saw at the post office. Irene! He invited her to come to the meeting and she said oh, yeah, I forgot, which she probably really did. She’s not a young one. But the amazing thing is she came over. By the time we finished we had a 3-month activities calendar, assignments made for our first quilting night, and had a lovely discussion of visiting teaching. Shauna used to live in Pinetop and she’s only been a member for a year. She said, “They used to do a neat thing in Pinetop. They had 2 ladies that came over and every month and gave a little lesson and were like friends to me.” That would be Visiting Teaching! And it’s done in a few more places than Pinetop. We asked Irene if she could assign some visiting teachers and we could just try it. She said she would, but she won’t. And I asked Shauna if she and her husband are interested in going to the temple and we set April 7 as their date! We’ll start the temple classes when we get home from Arkansas. We would have liked to take her March 10 with that group but since Shauna is a new member we better give her all the classes, and there’s not time now to do that.

Isn’t it amazing that Irene just happened to be at the commercial center at the exact time Robert went. He was only there like 30 seconds and yet he ran into her. These are the times you just have to love a mission.

After the meeting we cleaned house as we didn’t have time to do our housecleaning on Monday. Casper Thompson came for his first reading lesson. Scouts was cancelled because Bro Wilcock had to go to the “Valley”—that’s what everyone here calls the Phoenix area. So Robert had to take kids home who showed up for Scouts. And we provided taxi service twice today for Gilbert and Alma. Robert said he got Famisha to laugh. She’s so cute!

Keegan, Faith and Ariel all came by with valentines for us. That was really cute, too.