Service

For His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi, the Head of State of Samoa, a mid-September trip to Salt Lake City is all about family. First, there were the extended family members with whom he shared Sunday brunch, renewing acquaintances and making familial connections. And then there was the work he is doing in Utah on behalf of that broad and expansive family back home in Samoa, about whom he worries like a father worries about his children.

Mormon Helping Hands projects to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Church Welfare Programme were fulfilled when over 300 faithful saints from the Greater London area turned out to work. We had dozens of youth there, building, instead of pulling down the community. At each of the three sites friends were made and promises to maintain relationships were swapped. In particular, we proved to the Mayor of London's Office that on a weekday with short notice, the Church could mobilise significant numbers of cheerful, willing and able volunteers to serve with no thought of a return.

The priests at Meiji Shrine in Tokyo — a shrine of such importance in Japan that it can be compared to the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. — recently invited Church leaders here to describe how Latter-day Saints conduct their humanitarian efforts around the world, but especially in Japan following the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku. Meiji Shrine is in the heart of Tokyo and was built in 1910 to honor the Emperor Meiji who re-opened Japan to the world in the 1860s. It is one of the three most important shrines in the Shinto religion and is a Tokyo landmark known to almost every visitor from abroad.

They did not come neatly dressed in shirt and tie, ready to proclaim the Book of Mormon. Instead, wearing bright yellow T-shirts, 40 volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came armed with chainsaws, work gloves and wheel barrows; and Saturday morning, they knocked on two Hodges Road doors to clear a large hardwood whose limbs covered much of the land between the properties.

More than 120,000 hours of service were rendered in over 40 African countries, Madagascar, Reunion and Mauritius in celebration of the 5th Annual All Africa Mormon Helping Hands day Saturday, 20 August 2011. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from Johannesburg (South Africa) to Nairobi (Kenya), Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) to Maputo (Mozambique), Harare (Zimbabwe) to Accra (Ghana), Lusaka (Zambia) to Gaborone (Botswana) and Luanda (Angola) to Windhoek (Namibia) participated.

The 2011 “All Africa Service Project” of The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) brought several Church members together to be part of clean-up exercises in various communities throughout the country and Africa at large. In Accra, among some of the places and communities where these exercises took place included the Korle-Bu Polyclinic, Mamprobi Polyclinic, and Usher Clinic at James Town, Tesano Total Filling Station to the Abeka Market, Alajo, Mamobi Polyclinic and the New Horizon School at Cantonments.