More photos from the 27th evening events at the Kailas Mandir in Surrey, a new temple started by the Fijian community. More photos of the temple events below.

Meanwhile present time, today Bodhinatha writes:

“This morning we checked out of our Vancouver hotel, took a flight from Vancouver to Calgary, were met by the President of the Calgary temple, Panchalingam. He was born in a village three miles from Columbuturai, Sri Lanka.”

Master Course student Maruthu Pandian Dharmalingam is from a town outside of Klang, Malaysia and is here for a month on Task Force.

Maruthu completed his medical studies and is now in a first year program at a hospital in Sarawak, Malaysia.

He always wanted to come to the Aadheenam, see Iraivan Temple..

And to see the “place where Gurudeva lived.”

We are really happy to have another man on the team for 30 days.

Sivanadiyar Satya has been rotating thru the various kulams to get to know everyone and assisting in a diverse number of tasks. He was with Pillaiyar Kulam this phase on Sun Two. His service therecan range from sending letters to people who register books, changing addresses for Hinduism Today subscribers, shrink-wrapping booklets for people who attend festivals on the mainland, arranging magazines and booklets in our Jnana Dana container and sending complimentary books to prisoners. Today Satya is working on packing kumkum in jars. These should be available at our Mini Mela store on Kauai and at www.minimela.com.

Andre Garzia has been with us for nine days. Most of that time was spent with the PK also. Here he and Natyam Jivanandanatha have been working with various projects such as coding web pages for online donations, creating a 4D database “reporter” for credit card transactions, setting up a fund description page for HHEonline.org, moving the HHE website to a new format and a Master Course donation form. Today they are working on a “grep” routine for finding email addresses. They are laughing at three pages of code they found on the web to do this. Andre has accomplished a lot during his nine days visiting the monks.

Andre flew off back to Los Angeles last night then on to Brazil from there. Just before leaving we took final photos. Here he is with a new friend: Kartikeya Katir.

He spent his last day with Sivakatirswami working through plans for a variety or projects: new upgrades to the Digital Edition of Hinduism Today, refinements for the RSS feed for HPI, future planning for a complete online glossary, a special web page editor and more.

It was a really fruitful visit.

The cool welcoming trades are back and it is another gorgeous day. This is the time of the year when all flowering trees and plants are in full bloom all over the island.

A couple arrived for the morning puja at the Kadavul Siva Temple, Rama and Sastry Ambatipudi from California, previously Madras. They were joined by a large family from Tennessee, three brothers, Ratilal Patel, Suresh Patel, and Mahesh Patidar and their wives and one sister, all originally from Surat, Gujarat, India.

Following the puja the entire group was taken for a tour of the property. A brother and sister from Oahu, Marie Ponce and Curt Sanders joined us. A group photo was taken near the beautifully hand-carved Dakshinamurthy which sits under a sacred banyan tree.

Another group photo in front of the Chitra pillars following a tour of the Iraivan Temple.

This is their first visit to this Island and this sacred Temple. Following the tour, Mahesh Patidar stated that “there are no words to describe how he felt following this mornings experience.” We then headed back to meet with Arumugaswami who was going to give them a tour of the Aadheenam Press Rooms.

Our aquarium is finally finished and back in full operation after quite some down time. It is set in the wall between two rooms, visible from both sides. We switched from salt water to warm fresh water.

The tank contains large 6 inch fish called Discus (which we call Chakra) that originated from the Amazon in Brasil. Hard to tell from the photo, but the tank is actually 6 feet across and holds 269 gallons.

Very unusual fish: as our consultant and expert on this species, a local Kauai man, Rodney says, “They are more like pets than fish. They can recognize individuals and watch everything going on outside in the room.”

In this series Bodhinatha arrive and speaks at the Kailash Mandir, gives darshan, passes out vibhuti and talks with the temple trustees. They are just getting started and he offered to send them a Ganesha Deity — an old tradition that Gurudeva started many years ago.