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Ia’Orana, Everyone –
I am in a very familiar spot right now. I’m on a United Airlines 747, ready to take off from Shanghai, China bound for San Francisco, California, and then on to Salt Lake City and home. Looking out the window I can see all the ground personnel hurrying about getting everything ready for our flight, and I can imagine the pilots are doing their checklist and going through the flight plan.
In a few minutes, we will be flying at over 35,000 feet and more than 600 miles per hour as we cross the Pacific Ocean heading eastward. I have made this flight many, many times before. The cabin is full of people anxious for the flight. Some, like me, are heading home; others are at the beginning of a new adventure away from their home in China. As many times as this scene is replayed in my life, it never ceases to impress me. I’ll be home in a few hours leaving this temporary world behind.
On May 12, I was in Beijing, China visiting with Liang Qin, one of our Chinese Black Pearls. For those of you who do not know, due to the strict laws regarding direct sales in China, our business is done in a very unique way in China, unlike any other market in the world. Liang Qin had just opened a small shop in Beijing for the purpose of showcasing Tahitian Noni® products. We had just taken a tour of this beautiful new facility and were posing for some photographs just after 2:00 p.m. when we felt a tremor—a small earthquake. We didn’t pay any attention to it and continued our business for the day, but later heard that this small tremor we felt in Beijing was actually a devastating earthquake centered in southwest China, in Szechuan Province near the major city of Chengdu. We were 800 miles from the epicenter of the quake.
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