“I Know Every Nail”

In September 1955, just a week after 26-year-old Mote Siufanua joined the Church, his district president asked if he could serve a labor mission. When Mote told his mother he planned to go, she was supportive but worried about what his father, a leader in the London Missionary Society Church, would think. “You know, I’m the head deacon of this church,” his father told him when Mote came to talk. “But it’s okay. You go ahead.” Mote received his mission call the next Tuesday. His first assignment was to Suva, Fiji, where, because of government requirements, the missionaries had to construct a meetinghouse in less than a year. While there, Mote served as the Mutual Improvement Association president and then in the branch presidency. After his crew completed the Suva meetinghouse in just 10 months, Mote continued his mission in Samoa.

Still a recent convert, Mote learned about the gospel and Church service from the teaching missionaries. He joined other labor missionaries in early-morning or evening classes, which were taught by the teachers from the Church’s high school in order to prepare students for higher education. Mote also gave reading and writing lessons to his fellow labor missionaries after dinner each day. After extending his mission for another two years and then finally returning home, Mote married Safiono, a Church member from Western Samoa. They raised nine children and served the Church faithfully in American Samoa. In 1968 the family traveled together to the temple in New Zealand to be sealed.

Mote’s experience as a labor missionary prepared him for a career in construction, for additional Church building assignments, and for service in the Faleniu Ward. He always made sure that the construction of Church buildings was done with excellence. Once, upon inspecting a freshly placed beam, he told the workers to take it back down. “If we do anything for the Lord, we do the best we know how,” he told them.

When construction of the Apia Samoa Temple commenced in 1981, the Saints in American Samoa were asked to donate their time and means to the effort, just as the Saints in Samoa were doing. “I saw the faith of those women who contributed,” Mote said. He also made trips with other men from American Samoa to assist with the construction. Mote was part of the group assigned to build the tower where the angel Moroni would stand. “I was at the temple right from the bottom to the last nail of the roof,” he later recalled. “I know every nail. … I feel like I was a part of the temple.”

In 2003 a fire destroyed the temple that Saints from American Samoa and Samoa had worked so hard to help build—but the statue of the angel Moroni, atop the tower Mote had helped construct, endured through the flames. In 2005, during the temple’s reconstruction, the statue was once again placed atop the temple. Fourteen years later, in 2019, President Russell M. Nelson announced plans to build a temple in Pago Pago, American Samoa, bringing a temple even closer to American Samoan Saints and adding another chapter to their long legacy of faith.