VISIT TO HAMILTON, NEW ZEALAND

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.