June 1, 2014

This is a picture of the last group of missionaries we taught before they left to go home. We teach a two hour workshop related to the changes and challenges they will face when they go home. We also get them started on a resume and get them signed up on LDSjobs and make sure they are contacted by their local Self-Reliance center as soon as they get home. It's pretty critical that the people returning to any of the islands get contacted immediately and get started on an education path and get begin the path to receive a PEF loan. It's been interesting to talk to people from the islands, almost all of them say the same thing about returning home; most say their biggest fear is that they will get home and go inactive and stay unemployed. They've seen many, many return missionaries do just that. Most young people don't have jobs, they just hang around the village. There are a couple of reasons why: there's not many good jobs available for one thing, and the other reason is that if they get a job their parents expect them to turn all the money they make over to them. So, their reasoning is, "I'm not working right now and not making any money, but if I get a job and start making money, I have to give it all to my parents, so why work, the net result is the same, I'll have no money either way." This same thing happens over here too, except in Australia the parents make the young people get a job and then buy a car for the family. The parents can't get a loan because they are usually on welfare and living in subsidized housing, so they make their older children get a loan for a car thereby trapping the child into the debt cycle. All young islanders have a very strong allegiance to their parents, so they obey and get the car for the family and then there's no extra money for them for advanced education. We try to get everyone living in an eligible area, started on the education opportunity path before they get home. Our hope is that it will help them break the cycle.

One of these young men is from Vanuatu and does not have his high school diploma. He wanted help knowing where to go and what to do to be able to get his high school equivalency. We contacted the country manager over there and he said it's very common for them not to graduate; 75% of students in Vanuatu don't graduate from high school! Crazy.

We went to a job/university fair this week. Many of the universities and technical schools were there. We got to go to some classes too which helped us get a little more understanding about how things work over here. There is a wide variety of uniforms among the different schools. Most are pretty traditional, blazers and skirts or pants is the norm. I snapped a couple of examples of blazers that made me wonder just who was in charge of picking out the uniform, most likely people who were colorblind.

There are quite a few schools in Sydney for Muslims. 

One of the ladies who works here in the center treated us to a rugby game with her and her husband. His company has a corporate box, so we got to watch the game from up above in the box. It was a lot of fun, plus we got a lot of free food! The weather was just perfect too. Too bad we didn't have the corporate box the night we sat out in the rain to watch the game. One plus for the cheap seats though, is that you're a lot closer to the action of the game!

Grandkids:

On Saturday afternoon we decided to finally take the time to go downtown and see the convict barracks. This is the building that was finally built to house the convicts Britain sent here. After Captain Cook discovered Australia he claimed it for Britain. Britain wasn't too sure what to do with such a big piece of land, but then they thought about it for a little while and realized it would make a great place to send all their prisoners. Since Britain is such a small country, they didn't have room to keep all their prisoners in prisons, so they used to send them off to other countries. They sent about 60,000 prisoners to America over all the years that America was a British colony, but by about 1776, after the War for Independence, America said they would not take any more prisoners from Britain, so Britain had to look for a place somewhere else in the world to send all their prisoners. Captain Cook had come back to Britain a few years earlier, in 1770, and told them he'd discovered Australia and that there was a lot of room there, so the King decided to send all their extra prisoners to Australia. Back in those days it was pretty easy to end up being a convict. England had some pretty crazy laws. You could be sentenced to death for stealing a rabbit! About this time in history something called the Industrial Revolution took place. It was when people figured out how to make machines to do a lot of the work people used to do (like spinning cotton and making it into fabric). Because machines took over a lot of the work that people used to do, there were a lot of people who were unemployed and couldn't make enough money to buy food or pay their bills. Some people stole their food and some poor people robbed rich people, and some people just couldn't pay their bills so they got sent to the poor house, which was like a prison. Because of all the poor people and because of the crazy laws, Britain had a lot of prisoners they needed to find a place for. Britain (Ireland was part of Britain too) had a lot of orphan children too because their parents had died from starvation or were in prison for stealing food or breaking some kind of law trying to feed their children. The British decided they needed a place to send all those children too. Australia seemed like a good choice, so off they all went to Australia. It took almost 8 months to get there by ship. There were also regular people from England who decided they wanted an adventure, so some of them got on some other ships and they went off to seek their fortunes in Australia too! When the prisoners got to Australia the ships unloaded all of them in Sydney harbor (back then it was called Botany Bay). All of the people and all of the prisoners didn't come at the same time, they arrived over about 80 years time. When the first prisoners got to Australia there were no houses or anywhere to live. No one cared where the prisoners lived, so they just had to build their own little shacks. They had to work everyday though. Pretty soon they ended up being given to the British people who were moving to Australia and they had to work for them and be their slaves.

If you look very closely you can read how many years the convicts had to work before they could be free. If you shot a gun or broke into someone's house you had to go to prison (or Australia and be a slave) for life!

The prisoners that didn't have to be slaves for the Colonists had to live in town and work building roads and digging ditches. They got to live in this building:

They didn't get beds to sleep in, they had to sleep in hammocks. You might think sleeping in a hammock like this would be fun, but Grandpa and I laid down in them and they are NOT comfortable. You are squished and your head and feet are up too high, plus you can't even turn over. You have to stay in the same position all night! Plus, you are sleeping very close to your neighbor and if he wiggles around in his sleep he might just bump you hard enough to make you fall out of your hammock onto the floor. Sleeping in this place would not be fun.

We learned a lot from our visit to the Barracks building. There were lots of things to see and to learn about, way too many things for me to show you everything. I think you all would have liked to go visit this building with us. However, you would NOT like to live in this building, the beds are not comfortable and rats live there too and steal your stuff!

One thing I thought was very interesting is that this whole building and everything in it was built without nails. It was too hard and too expensive to make nails, so everything in this building, including all the walls and the roof were made from wood.  The people were very smart because this building is over 200 years old and is still standing and is in very good shape! Here is a picture of how they kept the wood together without using nails.

Before we went home Grandpa and I went to this Catholic church called Saint Mary's. It's very old and is very beautiful. It has lots of stained glass windows. This church reminded me of the churches we saw in Europe last fall.

I hope you all have a great week! Grandpa and I love you and miss you a lot.