Baptism and Birthday

Monday evening we went to the Toli's to celebrate Mele's 10th birthday and to give them another marriage and family relations class. As we were about to leave at 8:00 pm Aho and Manui Langi and family showed up with more cake and ice cream, potato chips and drinks. Here is Aho with his daughter Meleane and the Toli's baby Lamai. Those two are best buds.
Here Mele is blowing out the candles from the Langi cake. She said she received 5 cakes. No celebration is complete without potato chips
On the left is Puta, Aho's brother and his bride Tama'a. They are looking at their weding pictures. I printed a couple for them on our printer. Aho and Manase who are long time friends. They were buddies in a single adult group in Samoa. They are both Tongans who through separate routes ended up in Greymouth. Aho came two or three years ago to work in the forest industry. Manase has been in NZ at least 12 years and just moved to Greymouth 7 months ago.
The sister sitting next to Sister Hoagland is Manui Langi. We are teaching her and her son Lesili (big eyed boy) English, we hope. Sister Hoagland teaches piano to Hola Langi, second from left and Mele on the right. Hola lives with the Toli's during the week so she can go to a better school on this end of town. Hola has progressed so much, learning English and New Zealand culture. Sister Toli should be given a lot of credit for that. Their school is all European except the two girls.
Here Mele is blowing out the candles from our puny little cake. They saved it for school lunches. They must have known the bigger cake was coming later because they put the cake and ice cream we brought away while we gave the lesson.

Here is our beautiful Mele after her confirmation. The next day she voluntarily participated in a fast for Sister Carpenter who had lost her son in a canoeing accident. Her mother was rightfully very proud.
Here we are with Manase Tole, Mele's proud and happy father before the baptism.



We took the Elders to the community gym following Mele's baptismal interview. Everyone here is a member except the girl on the far left. More adult men showed up before we left and the smaller kids went and played hide and seek. Note the climbing wall at the end.
I put this picture in to show you one of the best tasting potato salads we have ever tasted. You will see two identical bowls of salad. When we told Ola how good it tasted she said she used 1 1/2 trays (45) of eggs in the two bowls. With that and the mayonaise there wasn't much room for potatoes.