Communication Class Speech

Leaving Guava, Pinworms, Elephantiasis for The Promised Land

I hope in my High-Context culture  Tahitian/ Chinese culture that my experiences and experimentations I shared with you today was emotive and personal, with a high degree of subjectivity with a stress on relationships, high emphasis on protocol and social customs. Yes indeed my reasoning has been based on experience and experimentation  with a preference for holistic thinking focused on the big picture and interrelationships between all these stories.

Very organic speech.
No Tahitian word for borrow, lend, please 

Elephant ear stem dolls in empty sardine can beds

The Rich have this deep inane yearning  to give and help the world be better. Why?

quote examples

homelessness:An average tent city might cost approximately $30 to $60 per person per month to operate, for example, while the average monthly cost of housing an individual in a homeless shelter, transitional housing, or permanent supportive housing is $1,634 to $2,308.5 Furthermore, certain tent cities can provide benefits-including community and a sense of security-that are less available on the street, or often even in homeless shelters. ..

(http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=californialawreview)

What excellent resources do we have presently to help us?

personal prayer

our own God-given talents and abilities

assets available to us through our own families and extended family members and friends

The support of various community resources.

The Blessings of Providing in the Lord’s Way

Quote :    Providing for ourselves and others is evidence that we are disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.—Julie B. Beck  (“Visiting Teaching Message,” Ensign, June 2011)

Quote :    “If thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noonday: and the Lord shall guide thee continually” (Isaiah 58:10-11).

To illustrate the principle of “inspired self-help” and the blessings that come from practicing it, I want to share with you a family story:  

Story:

I remember the remarkable resourcefulness of my Tahitian grandparents.  My grandmother, on the tiny South Pacific island of Taha’a, used to call out to passersby, E pata to te fare! Haere mai e tama! There is butter in the house! Come, eat!  Let me tell you how she got her butter.  My grandfather was a vanilla grower, but to get extra cash while waiting for the vanilla crop to ripen he became a fagotier. Wherever he walked he would gather dead wood into bundles and then he would sell them to the mercantile store for niceties such as sugar, butter, corned beef, baguettes, and petrol.  He would gather wood until his horse was overloaded with dry faggots for the baker, who always needed wood for his oven to bake the morning's batches of French baguettes.  This was my grandfather’s personal welfare program for himself and his family.

My parents also practiced inspired self-help when they planned to leave Taha’a for the bigger island of Tahiti to give me a chance for a better life.  They began by becoming dogcatchers.  My Chinese grandfather, who owned a local store, had friends on the island of Tahiti, rich Chinese merchants who needed dog meat for their Chinese New Year festivities, and my grandfather obliged them. My father caught forty dogs, found loitering all over the island of Taha’a.  

So picture me with my bobbed hair, four years old, sitting nervously among a melee of travelers and forty yelping, growling dogs that were tethered by ropes to a thick, gnarly tree branch.  It was a dangerous plan.  My father could hardly control them—remember, they were abandoned, feral dogs.  He saw us off on the hydroplane to Tahiti, and then he himself boarded a larger boat with cheaper fare and room for his cargo of three dozen snarling animals.  In the process those dogs started a huge fight among themselves, and my father, trapped in the tangle of ropes and excited canines, pawed and bitten, came out of it by the skin of his teeth, thanks to the help of other passengers.

Once we arrived in Tahiti my Chinese grandfather also moved there, near his daughter's grocery store and only a few blocks from the new Mormon Elementary School, where the temple is currently standing.  My parents were hired to care for an uncle's cattle in the district of Hitia’a, two hours away from my school.  So on weekdays I stayed with my grandfather near the school, and on weekends my father made the round trip on his Vespa, to and from Papeete, to take me to and from school.

But my life did not drastically change for the better until my parents were able to move from Hitia’a to Papeete, nearer to my mother's brother, Uncle Amosa, and his family.  (This is the family that stayed in our home in Provo while we were on our mission to Tahiti.)  From the first day, they made it their whole purpose to prepare my parents and their siblings to go to the temple in New Zealand, to receive their endowments from the Lord and partake of the blessings of an eternal family.  Some needed to learn about the temple and qualify for a recommend.  They set a deadline for earning and saving enough money to take my grandparents, who were ready, and as many siblings as possible to be sealed in that temple.

My father, determined to earn his share of the cost, cleverly constructed a three-by-five-foot wooden box on small wheels.  Then at night he and my mother towed this box behind our neighbor’s Vespa to the parking lot of a dance club, where they set up shop as concessionaires.  Their food supplies were packed into the box, which later served as a display counter for various dishes, boiled eggs, pastries, drinks, and a portable, wood-burning grill.  This was a great location for late night snacks of Baba Au Rum washed down with Pepsi or Fanta, or a quick dinner plate of Salade Russe and Poisson Cru with Poulet Roti, a beet-pink potato and raw fish salad with roasted chicken, or—everyone's favorite—brochettes, beef heart shish-kebabs grilled over local wood charcoals, served slathered with mustard and barbecue sauce and a slice of French bread.  The fragrance alone would bring customers from the far side of the parking lot in a hungry trance.  

Working every night, my parents slowly accumulated enough money by means of this little wooden box to travel to the temple.  At first they left my baby brother and me asleep on the floor at home while they were away.  But one night my brother rolled too far and knocked over the oil lamp they had left for us, turned low so we would not be in the dark.  At 2 a.m. the next morning my mother came home to this horrifying scene—two small children fast asleep, with petrol from the lamp spilled all over their bedding, the tiny flame apparently snuffed out somehow.  After that episode, our parents took us with them and we played in the parking lot while our parents worked.  I like to think that a guardian angel snuffed out that flame, an angel who wanted all of us to get to the temple.

We all made it to the New Zealand Temple—twice!  The adults spent a whole month attending temple sessions, while we children ran amok over the sunny (but frosty) green fields of the Hamilton countryside, picking sour oranges and sliding or rolling down the grassy slopes of the temple hillside.  

Those were happy days, indeed.  We ate triple-decker ice cream cones.  We enjoyed the foreign scents of fish and chips served in newspapers, of fresh oranges and mutton stew, and of the beautiful thick-petaled red camellias that grew behind the temple workers’ quarters.  We flushed out tiny green frogs and round, spiky porcupine balls from the crevasses and motes that edged the sheep enclosures.  We cast ourselves as Peter Pan and his crew from Never-Never Land, having adventures and discovering everything for the first time.

Returning home from our first temple trip, my parents could no longer claim to be ignorant of the commandment to keep the Sabbath Day holy.  They knew better now.  Saturday night had always been their best night for business because of the Saturday night boxing matches and other events that brought crowds of latecomers to our humble roadside cart.  But in obedience to the covenants they had made in the temple they swallowed hard, closed up their wooden box on Saturdays at midnight, and never looked back.

Within the year they were able to buy a new car and eventually purchased a food truck.  In no time at all we had everything our hearts desired—the best education, a second vehicle, a piano, another home, a pig farm, a second trip to the temple—all of these things in addition to the covenant blessings of the temple itself.

Soon thereafter, at sixteen, I met my husband, a missionary from Price, Utah.  I came to Utah on the Fourth of July in 1976 and was married in the Manti temple on August 7.  Subsequently we raised six children together.  Then in 2002 we left on a mission with our three youngest children, and returned to Tahiti for three more years.  And here I am now, standing before you as the president of your Relief Society.  What remarkable things have come because my resourceful father was not afraid to catch wild dogs on Taha’a!

Conclusion

The principle of Self Reliance, the cornerstone of the Church Welfare Plan, based on hard work and ingenuity has not changed, although the programs and solutions grow more diverse with the changes of time.

We have come a long way since the starving Brigham Young stood at the printing shop's door not knowing where to get food for his family.

There is no good reason why anyone in our ward or area should be destitute and without food because The Lord has provided abundantly for such situations through fast offerings and other donations by the members.

As in my life's story, circumstances  do not improve drastically until hard work produces self reliance, our spirituality grows, commandments are followed, and temple endowments are profited thereby.

The Lord, I am sure of it, moves people by the Holy Spirit to places where the blessings of the gospel will reach them.

Then the blessings that come are  beyond all expectations. 

To be poor is not necessarily to be deprived.  And to be deprived is not necessarily to feel deprived.  I think it never occurred to my grandparents that they might have been poor. Yet grandfather went barefoot always.  It was only when he went to the reef to fish for his family's meals that he wore an expedient pair of self-made sandals, made from the fresh bark of trees growing near the sea.  Later on in their lives, do you suppose my grandparents pined for their tiny island when they were surrounded by the luxuries their children could provide for them in Tahiti?  You bet they did, every day!  I think they actually felt poorer surrounded by heaps of bread and butter and steaks and chickens, and currents of electricity.

My point is that the material things of this world pale in comparison to the blessings that come from living the fullness of the Gospel.  We are the richest of all God's children, the zillionaires of these last days!

What am I hoping you will take away from this lesson and from the story of my life?

That the Lord expects us to resourcefully take action to help ourselves, our families, and others in need.  

And He will direct us—in His own way.  

He is ever nudging us forward, onward, toward our destiny, ever so gently coaxing us to do His will,

so He can give us the blessings that have always been reserved for each of us.