Welcome family and Friends!

We are serving our second mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This time we are serving in Cebu City in the Philippines. We will be working in the new Cebu temple that was recently completed. This mission will be completely different than our first mission, with lots of new experiences. A different language is spoken here then was spoken in our other mission. Our first mission blog is still available to view. If you haven't seen it, let me know and I'll send you the link.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Knut is Tongan and Norwegian. He lives in New Zealand. Well, he and his family have lived in Cebu since 2006, as he built the temple. He also built the Tongan temple and repaired the Samoan and Tahiti temples. He was not a member of the church until a year ago when he had a personal experience in the temple by himself. He then wanted to be baptized. His wife was a member, so she thought, all her life. After he was baptized six months, a ward clerk was doing some checking on his church records and dates for his family. To their shock, his wife was not a member of the church, so he had the privilege of baptizing his wife. They are going to come back and be sealed in this temple.
As a builder/contractor in New Zealand, one must have training and contractor education for 12 years in order to obtain a license. They have to know how to do everything about building. He is a genius. He had major problems to solve. He had to bring in everything of the highest quality from around the world to build this temple, because this poor country does not have such things. He then had to bring in qualified workers from other countries to train the local workers how to work with the tools, equipment and quality of craftsmanship that is unknown here. He had huge water issues to deal with. They found Japanese tunnels twelve feet under ground that were from WWII that had to be filled with thirty trucks of cement. They found three bombs from WWII. Amazing things! As a tribute to him, one of the inspectors that goes all over the world inspecting temples, said that this temple is in the top five of all temples, for doing everything exactly the way it should be done.

Elder Ganir and Knut. He is the master builder of the temple. He is the contractor in charge of the whole operation.

He had some great stories of his experience in building this temple. There were some huge challenges that had to be solved in building this temple.