Robert Decker, Emeritus
Department of Educational Leadership and Postsecondary Education
University of Northern Iowa
Since retiring from the department in December, 2013, my wife Paula and I have served two missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We left Iowa in January, 2014 and served in Fiji for 18 months as ITEP missionaries (International Teacher Education Program). Our assignment was to teach BYU Hawaii courses to church school teachers who did not have a teaching certificate. We worked with teachers from the Church Primary School (elementary) and from the Church College (high school).
While in Suva, Fiji we were able to travel to other parts of the South Pacific to such places as Kandavu (one of the 330 islands that make up the country of Fiji) as well as New Zealand and Australia. Suva is on the island of Viti Levu which is the largest of the Fijian islands and is the capitol of the country. During our stay in Fiji I took many pictures and have great memories of the people, culture, and customs of the beautiful country. There are many stories that we have to share and we have made lifelong and eternal friends with the people of Fiji. The Fijian people are some of the poorest people I have ever met but they are the friendliest and loving people I have ever met. How I like to characterize the Fijian people is that they would give you the “shirt of their backs, if they had a shirt to give you.”
We returned home to Cedar Falls in August, 2015 and for five months we toured the US visiting our children and grandchildren. We have seven children who live in seven different states, mostly in the western United States. We also had a grandson who was going to school at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and playing soccer so we went East as well as West this this time.
After spending the holidays with family and friends we knew that we wanted to return to the mission field. In January, 2016 we were looking out our living room window and watching the snow with blizzard conditions so Paula and I looked at each other and said it was time to leave. In March, 2016 we received another mission call to go to Honolulu Hawaii Mission and are assigned to the Polynesian Cultural Center/BYU-Hawaii. Our assignment here is to work with junior and senior students and help them develop internship opportunities at the Polynesian Cultural Center. We also help recent graduates who are on international visas obtain and additional year of training (called Academic Training) before they return to their country or island from which they came. Students attending BYU-Hawaii come from over 70 different countries and speak 47 different languages. At a recent graduation ceremony there were 29 different countries identified from the graduation class.
We are on the north shore of the island of Oahu and are about 50 miles from Waikiki. We are enjoying the scenery and this part of the US where the customs are a little different from the mainland. The native Hawaiian people and some of the beautiful people we have seen. With a truly international representation here it is fascinating about learning about different cultures from around the world. Living among this population is inspiring as well as a learning situation.
We will be completing our assignment here in Hawaii in June, 2018 and our plans now are to return to Iowa to figure out what will be our next chapter in our lives.
