November 1

We had an interesting experience this past Sunday. The Public Affairs senior missionaries hosted a great event to honor a very special man named Scott Neeson.  Every year the Public Relations department gives an award called 'Standing for Something' to an Australian citizen who exemplifies the church's values of helping others. The one other criteria for the nominee is that this person cannot be a member of our church. This year, the award was presented to Scott Neeson, who grew up in Adelaide, the son of a laborer. He dropped out of high school and eventually found a job handing out movie posters. Long story short, he ended up moving up in the movie industry in Australia, was recruited by and eventually became President of, 20th Century Fox and was in charge of the release of many blockbuster movies, like Braveheart, Titanic, Star Wars and X-Men. He had just signed a contract to go to work for Sony Pictures Entertainment and decided to take a five week trip through Asia before starting his new job. It was on this trip that he stopped off Phnom Phen, Cambodia and ended up being taken to Steung Meanchey, a huge garbage dump in the city where thousands of children live and sort through the garbage each day trying to gather enough reusable trash to sell to vendors in the city to buy food. The death rate and trafficking rate of these children is incredibly high as you might imagine. The poverty and plight of these children, many of whom are orphans, touched him so much that, even though he was rich, famous, and only 45 years old, he made the decision to help these children full time. Over the course of the next year he sold everything, his big house, vacation homes, luxury cars, boat, etc. and had lawyers negotiate his way out of his contract with Sony and then he moved to Cambodia. He established the Cambodian Children's Fund and at present has over 2,200 children in his program. The very first girl he helped (the first day he was taken to the garbage dump on his vacation) back in 2003, was 11 years old when he met her. She was scavenging the dump to provide money for her alcoholic mother and her little sister dying of typhoid. That very day he paid to get them set up in a home, got medical care for the little sister, and paid the school fees for the 11 year old. He said it cost him $42 a month to provide all that for them. This young woman is a sophomore in college right now. His organization is quite large now as you might imagine and provides for some children (orphans) to live on site and provides schooling and food for those who have families. Click on the link for the newspaper article. In the article you can also click on the link for his organization and find out much more about him. It's a fascinating story.  Dave and I visited with him for a short time after the meeting. He is an amazing man, very deserving of the award.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865613643/LDS-Church-will-give-Standing-for-Something-award-to-film-executive-turned-philanthropist.html

I'm attaching a link to a little video I took of the young adult choir rehearsing for the the program. I love to hear the Polynesians sing. Singing is something they do so well, the ability to harmonize seems to be a genetic trait they all possess:-) My camera doesn't do justice to their music; I wish you could hear it live!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b91r3lNbr0&feature=youtu.be

Grandkids:

Guess what? Grandpa and I went on a big sailing ship out into the ocean last Saturday! We reserved our trip about three months ago and have been looking forward to our trip for a long time. Fortunately, it turned out to be a great day, it was sunny and warm. It has been raining almost every day for the past two weeks, so we were a little bit nervous about what the weather would be like for our sailing trip, but it turned out to be great! We left Sydney harbor early in the morning and sailed all day out in the ocean. We got back into Sydney about dinner time. We were hoping to see some whales when we were out in the ocean, but sadly, we didn't see any. We did see a pod of dolphins swimming around at the back of the ship though:) The whales are on their way back to Antarctica right now. If you remember, a few months ago I told you about Grandpa and I watching the whales going up the coast to the Great Barrier Reef area to have their babies. They leave Antarctica right before winter starts (down here winter starts in June because we are on the bottom of the world so the seasons are opposite from the US) and they swim up north to the warm waters by northern Australia. They have their babies in the nice warm water and stay there for a few weeks while their babies get bigger and stronger, then in September and October the mama whales start swimming back to Antarctica and the babies swim right along with them on their journey. It's late enough in the year that most of the whales have already left Australia and are most of the way back home in Antarctica by now, that's probably why we didn't see any. 

This is our ship the James Craig. It was originally a freighter ship. It is 140 years old. It has sailed in every ocean except the Arctic ocean by Alaska. It was a busy working ship hauling cargo all over the world, but once steam ships were invented, the tall ships like the James Craig weren't used anymore. It hauled coal for a while, but was eventually beached and abandoned in Tasmania.  Thirty years ago volunteers decided to make it seaworthy again and have spent the past 30 years raising money and restoring it. These volunteers have restored it to just as it was when it sailed originally. 

These are the workers getting the sails ready to go before we leave the harbor. 

These are some of the workers. I like that they are old like Grandpa and me!

It was such a perfect day for sailing that, for the first time in many months, they were able to use all the sails.

Can you see the men working with the ropes?  

This is Grandpa getting on his harness for his climb up to the crows nest.  We had to pay extra for the chance to do this, but we decided that, since this will probably be our only sailing trip on a ship, we'd better take the chance to do it!!  

You have to take big steps to climb up the ropes!

Here I go!

Here I am about halfway up.  It's a long climb to the crows nest.  The view was pretty amazing from up there!

Click this link to watch a video I took of some of the people on our trip helping unfurl the sails. I guess way back in the time when this type of ship sailed in the ocean the sailors would sing songs to help them all pull on the rope at the exact same time. One of the lady volunteers is leading the song and the people pulling the rope are actually raising the sails of the ship. The people were told to pull on the words 'whiskey' and 'Johnny' in the chorus. They did a good job and got the sails raised by the time we got out of the harbor.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUmGQo9dXRo&feature=em-upload_owner
We had lots of fun on our sailing trip.  I wish you all could have come with us.  

On our way home from a meeting on Sunday we found this turtle walking across the road. Since it was a fairly busy road, we stopped and I got out and helped this guy get across safely. I don't think he even realized I probably saved his life:-)