I’m becoming more comfortable each day at the office with
the favored software there, along with my duties. It looks like more and more of my time will
be spent with litigation matters. One case
I started working on this week involves a claim by a young man that he should
have the same access to Family Search data that members have, even though he’s
not a member of the Church. He believes
that is discriminatory under NZ law, so he has filed a complaint with the Human
Rights commission here against the Church and Family Search. This will be an interesting case that will
last for a while I predict.
Friday morning I began working around 5:30 a.m., mainly
because I couldn’t sleep. I left the
office around 10 a.m., went home to pick up Alisa, and we drove to Hamilton, a
couple of hours south of Auckland. Part
of the purpose of this trip was to get me more used to driving NZ style, and I
did quite well on the freeways and city streets. Our new gps does quite well. Hamilton is a
town of about 150,000, and is where the NZ temple is located. We had light rain all the way. We checked
into our hotel, then dropped by to visit a couple of local outside attorneys
who do work for the Church. Afterwards,
we went out to dinner downtown at the Mekong Delta, a Vietnamese
restaurant. Alisa had their curry and
rice while I had a pho noodle dish.
Saturday morning we ate our free breakfast at the hotel,
then went by the Hamilton Gardens. I was
impressed. It was around 49 acres of fabulous
gardens in various styles, including traditional English, French, Japanese,
Chinese, herb, vegetable, fantasy, a Wimbledon style lawn, surreal, and others.
I really liked the citrus trees planted in containers in the Italian
garden. After walking around the gardens
for a couple of hours we drove on over to the temple grounds. The Hamilton temple is undergoing major
interior and exterior renovations, and is completely covered in scaffolding on
the exterior. We walked around the
exterior walls to view it. The temple is
surrounded by a village known as Temple View, somewhat like the set up in Laie
HI by the temple there. Then we drove to a newer youth camp the Church owns up
the road and walked around that. Finally
we went to the temple visitors center and museum. We visited with the legendary Sis. Parker (in
her younger days she was part of a well known female singing trio who appeared
on New Zealand t.v.), who has collected and preserved most of the momentos and
photographs in the museum. She has made
over 30 trips to the US to collect old photos and momentos from former
missionaries who served in NZ. These
photos date back to the 1880’s, apparently the only photos that go that far
back in NZ were all taken by early LDS missionaries, since they were the only
ones who had cameras. Sis. Parker even
sang for us and bore her testimony. We
toured the museum, then were given a tour of the grounds and the stake center
across the road by Elder and Sister Garlick, who are the Visitors Center directors. The Church did a survey and determined that
95% of visitors to our Visitors Centers around the world are already members of
our Church, so now the Visitors Centers are under the auspices of the Church
History department instead of the Missionary department.
By this time it was late afternoon so we headed
back to Auckland/Takapuna so we wouldn’t be caught in traffic and have to drive
after dark.
