Stories: Samoa Then and Now by Bob Toronto
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| The Samoan Mission, Then and Now
Robert S. Toronto Sacrament Meeting Talk Ann Arbor 2nd Ward November 22, 2009
Talofa! Talofa, lava! Ou te faafetai i le avea ai ma se tagata o le Ekalesia a Iesu Keriso o le Au Paia o Aso e Gata Ai. Ou te faafetai foi mo le tele o isi faamanuiaga sa ou mauina ai ma le Tama Faalelagi.
What I just said to you in Samoan was:
Greetings! Greetings, indeed! I am grateful to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I am also grateful for the many other blessing with which I’ve been blessed by my Father in Heaven.
What a great opportunity it is for me to share this time in a sacrament meeting with Sean Beck. Sean has been called to serve in the Samoan Mission--my mission. In preparing this talk, I’ve had the chance to revisit Samoa through my journals, books, memories and pictures.
It was about this time of the year in 1956 (53 years ago) that I received an envelope from the first presidency containing my mission call. Of course, I immediately called… my girlfriend, who would shortly be joining the ranks of the “Widow's Club.” These were the young women who sent their young men off on missions with the promise to write and wait faithfully till they returned 2½ year later. She came over to our house and she opened the letter. Samoa, it said. We whooped in delight. A number of my friends had gone or were going to the Samoan mission. And now I was going too.
On February 11th 1957, I caught a train for Los Angeles, boarded a cargo ship, the Ventura, and headed for the Islands; stopping for a day in Tahiti and arriving two days later in Pago Pago harbor, Tutuila, American Samoa. That evening we got onto the Manua Tele, a small, 10-person, inter-island craft, for the 80-mile, 12-hour, open-sea trip to Apia, Upolu, Western Samoa. We arrived in Apia the following morning. It had been sixteen days since we left Salt Lake City. That was then and this is now! Sean will board a plane in Salt Lake City, change planes in LA, head out over the Pacific. He’ll cross the international dateline and land in Tutuila the day before he left--about 14 hours later. He’ll hop a commuter plane and be in Upolu in an hour--10,000 miles in one day. We have come a long way.
My first assignment in Samoa was to teach in the Church school at Pesega. Mission Headquarters was located in Pesega and it was on the same grounds as the school. I met, taught and loved the young Samoans as high school students. I had a marvelous time interacting with them and with the elders and sisters who were assigned to the school and to the mission home.
Every Sunday morning we would roll out from the mission home for church meetings and Sunday schools in the branches spread along the North side of the Island and teach, speak and conduct meetings. They were held in a member’s fale (oblong, open-air, thatched roof houses). Then we would have dinner of taro, breadfruits, fish, or chicken and palosami. Palosami is coconut nut milk with a little salt and onion, wrapped in taro leaves and baked in an umu—a hot rock oven.
I have a copy of a Church News article dated July 5th 1958. It has pictures of Elder Wardel and Wakefield in their short-sleeve white shirts and bow-ties paddling a paopao (an outrigger canoe) across Fagaloa bay to the village of Salimo. Another shows me and my companion, Elder Hudson, again in short-sleeve white shirts, only in long ties, holding umbrellas like canes in our right hands and our Books of Mormon in the other. We walked and rode bikes. The lady missionaries traveled in the back of a pickup truck sitting on metal folding chairs with baskets of books and visual aids and a foot-pedal organ. Later on, the supervising elders were provided with Triumph motorcycles, to get to the far-flung points of their districts. My companions and I rode one for a period for time when I was the supervising elder in the Pesega and Sauniatu districts.
Back then there was no Missionary Training Center—No MTC. We had no language books to speak of, just a small guide to the study of Samoan called Everyday Samoan. We had no dictionaries, no language teachers, and we had no Preach My Gospel. We had to depend upon the gift of tongues which came with an enormous amount of effort. And so we were compelled by our circumstances and ignorance to teach by the spirit.
That was then and this is now! Sean will be in the MTC for eight weeks. He will come out speaking Samoan better than I did after I had been there a year. He will have a dictionary, language books and tapes. He will be drilled and spoken to and reasoned with in Samoan, 12 hours a day, six days a week. He will give lessons in Samoan and read Preach My Gospel in Samoan. And… he’ll be dying to get out of there just as soon as he possibly can.
I arrived in Samoa just after President Sampson, came with his family. He was a former insurance executive and he charged us to go proselyting and no longer work as branch leaders and teachers. It was time for the Samoans to take over those leadership roles and responsibilities. All of the Samoans were Christian. They all knew the Bible and most of them belonged to the La Mo Sa, the LMS, which stands for the London Mission Society. Others were Catholic, Methodist and Mormon and few were Seventh Day Adventist.
After ten months I was made a senior companion. My assignment was to the inland village of Lotofaga, where six months earlier the whole village had been baptized (about 50 new saints) and this because they got mad at their La Mo Sa minister. The old high-chief of Lotofaga had been baptized a Mormon in his youth and sent word into Pesega to have the Mission President come out and start a Sunday school. Elder Hudson and I were assigned to Lotofaga and charged with teaching them the gospel. Elder Hudson had just arrived and he knew nothing! He knew no language! He knew little of the gospel and he was struggling to believe the Book of Mormon.
We had no lessons in Samoan. So I made some up--the Godhead and the Book of Mormon--and went proselyting with Elder Hudson toddling along. Boom! Boom! Those were my big guns. After that I was at the mercy of the Samoans who knew their language and the Bible better than I did. I just went booming along learning the language and learning the scriptures as I went. Have you ever seen tumbleweeds blowing across the high mountain plains in Utah? Yea… it was like that. At the same time, Elder Wakefield was doing a similar thing on Savaii. We found ourselves in a friendly competition for the highest number of cottage meetings per month--about 50 to 55. Up to that time, that many cottage meetings per companionship was unheard of.
One afternoon when we got home from proselyting, my companion, Elder Hudson, was not feeling well and went to lie down. He was suddenly beset by an evil spirit which completely immobilized him. Part of his struggle to believe the Book of Mormon included that encounter with the evil spirit that possessed him. I cast it out in the name of Jesus Christ and by the power of the Melchizadec priesthood. Elder Hudson slowly sat up and reached his hand out as if to touch something. Later he told us that he knew Book of Mormon was true. He said that when he reached out he was seeing Moroni in the distance turning over leaves of the gold plates. He said that Satan was trying to prevent us from teaching the gospel to the people. He then said that saw a dark transparent figure standing outside of our fale. The evil spirit could not come in because, he said, “Elder Toronto, you have faith.”
By the time my cohort of missionaries left Samoa, 2½ year later, the mission was baptizing 2,000 converts per year and competing with the Northwestern States Mission for the highest baptizing mission in the church. At that time, Church membership in Samoa was a very small percent of the population.
That was then and this is now! Percentage wise, the Polynesian island nations have the highest church membership in the world. Granted their populations are small but the percent LDS is very large. For example Tonga’s population is 46% LDS; Samoa’s population is 36% LDS; Tahiti’s population is 8% LDS. There are thriving wards and stakes on the islands and they send their missionaries here. Temples grace the islands of Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, Fiji and New Zealand. In a recent Ensign Magazine, the Samoan Temple was called the Peal of the Pacific.
Who are these people? Why are they so receptive to the restored gospel? The answer is contained in a prophetic letter written in 1911 to the Polynesian saints by Joseph F. Smith, then the President of the Church. He wrote and I’m summarizing:
* The Polynesians are descendents of righteous Book of Mormon people.
* Their forefathers were lead away because they were more faithful than others living in the Americas.
* They were led away so that they would not be preyed upon and destroyed by their wicked brethren.
* They are fulfilling the prayers of their forefathers who prayed that their decedents would receive the gospel of Jesus Christ preached to them by the elders of the Church.
I was one of those elders. I came when President Sampson focused all missionary efforts on proselyting. This was the beginning of active proselyting in Samoa and I spent two of my years doing just that. I can’t possibly take you through the 600 pages of journal entries, the five district assignments, the good and bad experiences, the marriages that I performed, the people that I taught, the great fun that we all had, the activation of one who became my good friend and later a bishop; and the beginning of chapel building. All I can do is give you a glimpse of Samoan things past.
When I went over this talk with Ellen, my wife, she told me that I should not just talk about the wonderful stuff, I had to include some of the, the gross stuff, or else the kids wouldn’t pay attention. None of it was gross to me because it was just life. So… I’ll start with mosquitoes. Every evening in Lotofaga, we would sit on our mats, on the floor, with a mosquito net hanging down, tucked under the mat to protect us from the “dive-bomber” size mosquitoes. We would sit and read the scriptures by lantern light. I would pump up our lantern, light it, and read till it dimmed; then I’d pump it up again and read, and pump it up again and read; and so on for about five or six cycles every night.
Then there were the cockroaches. They chewed on everything that wasn’t protected. They were about an inch or more in diameter with feelers waving in the air another inch or so. They were harmless but they ate our books. And we had to shoo them out of our suitcases. The only poisonous creatures on the Island were the centipedes that grew to be about six inches long. The kids would catch them and pull out their pincers and let them crawl all over their hands and arms.
My all time favorite thing was boils. I was blessed with boils for the first year and a half of my mission--about one month or so. Not just little pimply-size sores but big things about half and inch around or more. Boils developed on my knees, on my neck, on my arms, and on my rear end, which made it particularly painful to sit cross-legged on the floor to teach gospel lessons. I came to recognize the ten-day developmental time-line of a boil. It starts with little sore spot that gets bigger and bigger till it is about an inch in diameter and gets tight as a drum and is more painful every day. Then it opens and begins to drain. I’d work on draining it every night
Well… that was then.
I want to read just one journal entry written shortly before I left my Island-in-the-sun, never to return, but never to forget, because it is in me. The Samoans are in me and I’m in them--the members, the converts, the investigators, the ministers, the high chiefs, the taulelea (untitled young men), the elders and the sisters. The spirit of the place is in me--the spirit of Samoa.
August 21st 1959. My journal entry reads:
“Dear Diary, You now have enclosed within your pages a photograph of the place that is dearest my heart—the town of Apia. This is the place in which I received more joy and happiness than any other place in the world. The joy was because of my teaching the gospel to people whom I loved and whom I still love very much—the kids at school (too numerous to mention), Rudy Keil, (who become a bishop), Cecil Crawley, Maaola, Marcheta Fruean, Sina Ah Koy, Arnolf, Mina, Anitipa, Mr. Stanley and his family, Arthur Roach and many others. Plus I received the love and association of the members of the Church--Percy Rivers, Charlie and Ann Rivers, the Keil family, and especially the Fruean family. If I had time, I could go on and on about the people and the loved ones and the happy days.”
“The love and friendship of the Lang Wai family, in whose place we lived in downtown Apia, will be cherished for the rest of my life—Mama, Alvina, Bessie, Amy, Sammy, Charlie and one of their friends, Nora Hagidon. I am especially close to the elders that were in residence there with me and were my companions--Elders Sampson, Buehner, Sanders, Wilson, Mower and Nelson. I love this place--the town of Apia--with all my heart. The situation that existed there made me the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”
“I thank God for putting me into Apia at this exact time, because many students came back from their schools in New Zealand. I met many fine young people. I was privileged to be a part of that group, yet I held a rather unique position, that of a Mormon Elder. I was young, driven, and a great lover of parties and dances but… the little word ‘Elder’ made me quite different. In appearance the same as the rest, but in thought speech and actions extremely different.
Many a times at a party as my companion and I watched the young men and women dance, my soul would yearn to give them the plan of happiness. Some received not a word; others received my testimony; a few others grasped my words and testimony and love until I thought I could not produce it fast enough for them.”
“Now that strange puzzle of young men, young women, elders, sisters and gospel lessons has exploded into many fragments and scattered throughout the world. It will never again be collected into that beautiful and joyful picture that is recorded forever in my mind. I was for a time able to saturate that puzzle with rays of gospel truth by my words, my personality and my actions. Because I did so, my soul was filled with joy.”
I can’t thank God enough for the privilege of being the supervising elder in the Pesega district right at that particular time. I know that I was put into Apia by revelation and I testify that I operated by revelation. When this wonderful puzzle exploded, so to speak, I was shifted by revelation to a new assignment--Supervising Elder of the Sauniatu District--a whole new and different adventure.”
“I am coming to the end of my mission and I know not what lies ahead but Heavenly Father will lead me where He wants me to go.”
And so ended my journal entry. That was then and this is now! Sean, you are going to teach the gospel to an open, loving people who take the missionaries in as if they were their own. You will be loved and respected and listened to. You will give them the fruit of the tree of life which they most assuredly deserve. You will find some who will listen to your words and you will give them the fundamentals of the gospel and start them down the pathway to eternal life.
They will watch you! They will do what you do, pray as you pray, and live as you live! That is a most humbling experience--to be in the role of an upright example. You will experience happiness and fun beyond your fondest dreams. And you’ll experience sorrow and dejection in ways that you have never felt it before. So I say, Sean, go and carry on the work in the Islands… my Islands.
May we all continue in the spirit of love and missionary service and may the God of our Fathers bless us with knowledge, joy and peace. This is my testimony and my prayer, which I leave with you in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
Bob Toronto
1817 High Pointe Lane
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48108
Phone: 734/668-0564
E-mail: rtoronto@umich.edu |
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