This
has not been one of my better weeks. I
won’t bore you with all the “gory” details of my bout with diarrhea. But I’m on the upper end and doing better. I stayed home on Monday and Tuesday, went to
the office on Wednesday, came home early on Thursday and was doing better by
Friday.
We
got new missionaries this week, 26 of them, one of which is a visa waiter that
was here two weeks ago and returned after his training at the Colombia MTC but
now needs to continue to wait for his visa.
With all these visa waiters, about 20 in all, we are now starting to
send them off. Five got their visas last
week and are gone with the exception of one.
Her mission president wasn’t ready for her yet. She goes on the 15th. Monday five more have appointments so that
will be about half of them. Lynn and I
have been helping, Paulina, the one upstairs who is in charge of visas so they
can get their visas. She takes care of all
the needs for visas in for all of the missions in Ecuador plus those leaving
from here and is fairly new so she is a bit overwhelmed. Her boss said to use the missionaries, so
that’s what we are doing.
On
Wednesday we had the training meeting for these new missionaries. Lynn and Elder Kaneen need to be there to do
part of the training and Sis. Ghent always needs extra help with the breakfast
that is part of it. Since I had been
gone on Monday and Tuesday I had a lot of catching up to do so I didn’t go with
them. Sis. Thomas and I held down the
fort while the others helped with the training and meals.
One
of our new missionaries is a sister and the only one in this group from the
USA. As I was making copies of all the
passports of this new group on Wednesday, I noticed that this sister’s passport
had not been stamped when she came through the immigration line at the
airport. This is something that is very
important to have since that is the date used to determine when the visa needs
to be renewed. The rest of the week
Lynn spent trying to determine how we get this corrected. On Friday he was sent to a couple of places
and talked with several people, each one not believing that it hadn’t been
stamped until he showed the passport and they looked through it and, sure
enough it wasn’t there. It basically
comes down to her having to go back to the airport, a two hour ride, plus
another couple of hours to come from where she is serving. But, that is also a problem because no one
knows how she can get back to the place she has to go to get it stamped, with
airport security the way it is. We’ve
decided that she will try when she comes in about five weeks for the
verification training meeting they have for those new missionaries to see how
well they are learning.
You
remember me mentioning our experience when we got our empadroniamentos, the paper
that we got to certify that we are legally here. You may also remember that Lynn found out
that they would no longer allow someone to get these for another person. Each person has to appear to get them for
themselves. This has caused a problem,
since it would require those serving in the far areas of the mission to have to
make a trip into Quito to have it done themselves. We’ve come up with what we think will be a
good substitute. I copy all the pages
of the passport that are important to show that the missionary is here with
valid authorization, which is the passport page itself, the visa page and the
stamped page that shows when they entered Ecuador. I then reduce these down to a little larger
than the size of a credit card with the passport page on one side and the visa
on the other along with the copy of the stamp.
These are then laminated. They look
pretty good. We are calling them their
ID cards, for lack of a better term. We
had one missionary call the other day from one of the areas that border
Colombia, where we are having the most trouble.
He said that he was having problems with being stopped and wondered what
he could do. We made his ID card a top
priority and will send it to him this next week. I guess this will be the test to see if it
works. We are hoping so. These only cost us about 50 cents and I can prepare
them in the office without the missionary as opposed to the empadroniamentos which
cost $4 and the trouble of getting them to Quito and two trips to the
immigration office, one with a very long wait.
Thursday
I tried going in for a while but didn’t last all day. Lynn came home with me just after lunch and
then returned, since he still needed to get the mail. As he and Elder Kaneen were at the post
office getting all the mail and packages for the missionaries it started to
rain. The post office isn’t too far away
but since they had a big load and it was raining they tried to catch a
taxi. Not one taxi would stop and there
were many that went by that were empty.
Lynn has decided that when it rains the taxi drivers don’t want to stop
to pick up those that are wet and get there taxi all wet. So, Lynn and Elder Kaneen came back to the
office soaked and the mail was wet as well.
They spread it all in hopes that it would dry without being completely
ruined. For the most part they dried up
pretty well. By the time it was time to go home it pretty much stopped raining
and the Kaneens were able to catch a taxi home, which they always do. Sis. Kaneen has a hard time walking the
distance since she has had knee surgery.
Lynn and I have taken the taxi this week since I have been sick and just
didn’t have it in me to do the walk.
On
Friday the Kaneens and I were waiting a long time to catch a taxi. Lynn had said he would just walk home and
give us more room in the taxi. The
funny thing is he beat me home since it took so long for us to get a taxi, and
it wasn’t even raining. Sometimes that’s
just the way it is. The previous Friday we had gone with the Kaneens to the big
mail where they have a food court where we had dinner. We sure had a hard time getting a taxi to
come home. It took us quite a while of waiting, plus the traffic was really
congested by the mall. It’s times like
this we sure miss having our car.
I tried something for dinner on Saturday that
really turned out terrible. When I was
buying groceries at the store downstairs I came upon pre-made pizza crust,
similar to what I had bought at home.
Pizza sounded good for dinner so I decided to try it. Right next to it was a small carton of what
looked like pre-cooked sausage, so I bought it along with some mozzarella
cheese. I had some left over spaghetti sauce so I used
that and added onions. Sounds good,
right. Wrong. As I took the first bit, what I thought was
sausage was more like ground up bone and grizzle. I got the carton out and asked Lynn what it
was. He wasn’t sure so he looked it
up. It said, “Chicharrón molido”. The dictionary said that it was residue of
hog’s fat. To say the least that pizza
went into the garbage. Hope we don’t get
sick with the little we tried to eat.
My
Spanish-speaking children and in-laws are probably laughing right now so they
will probably get a kick out of this next one.
Thursday, I was going through, what we call, the “locator”. This is a
color-coded excel spread sheet that the AP’s make every time they make any
changes to the assignments for the missionaries so that we, in the office can
locate them. Actually, Sis. Platts, has
just given it another name. It’s the
“Where’s Waldo” sheet. Anyway, I was
trying to update the mail list so that Lynn could know which zones to put the
mail and packages for each missionary.
We should be able to get this from IMOS but it takes a while for it to
catch up to the changes that the AP’s put in. The names are just listed with their last name
as companionships. I came across one
that said “Cerrado” color coded in pink for sister missionary. She also didn’t have a companion. I didn’t think we had a sister named Cerrado
and looked through the other lists for who this was. When I asked Sis. Platts is she knew who this
was she wasn’t sure until I showed the “Locator” to her and she realized that
what it meant was that the area was closed.
Cerrado means closed. OK, kids,
get off the floor from laughing. You can
have fun with me when I get home. The
next day Sis. Platts said that she told the AP’s about my mysterious “Sis.
Cerrado” and they got a real kick out of it, too.
 |
| This is the picture from the newspaper article. |
You may remember that the Phelps
are here as humanitarian missionaries.
Their boss, who is over the humanitarian efforts of the church here in
Ecuador and has his office upstairs, came down to our office on Friday to see
if we wanted to see Sis. Phelps on TV.
She and Elder Phelps were in Guayaquil this last week to accept thanks on
behalf of the church for a large number of wheel chairs that the church had
donated to a group there. This was
televised and they had an article in the local paper about it. It was kind of
special to see her there and how much the church is doing to help others.
President
Ghent was in in the office on Friday and we were talking about how frustrating
it sometimes gets when we have problems to solve and can’t get the response we
need from others. Pres. Ghent said, “Sis.
Nelson needs to get on the computer and find the quote from Elder Holland’s
last conference talk about imperfect people are all that God has to work with.” So I proceeded to find it and printed it
out. We now have it posted on our wall above
my computer so that we can be remind as we go through the nitty gritty of the
mechanics of mission office work. Here
it is.
“Brothers and sisters, this
is a divine work in process, with the manifestations and blessings of it
abounding in every direction, so please don’t hyperventilate if from time to
time issues arise that need to be examined, understood, and resolved. They do and
they will. In this Church, what
we know will always trump what we do not know. And remember, in this
world, everyone is to walk by faith.
“So be
kind regarding human frailty—your own as well as that of those who serve with
you in a Church led by volunteer, mortal men and women. Except in the case of
His only perfect Begotten Son, imperfect people are all God has ever had to
work with. That must be terribly frustrating to Him, but He deals with it. So
should we. And when you see imperfection, remember that the limitation is not in the divinity of the work.
As one gifted writer has suggested, when the infinite fullness is poured forth,
it is not the oil’s fault if there is some loss because finite vessels can’t
quite contain it all. Those finite
vessels include you and me, so be patient and kind and forgiving.”
(Elder
Jeffrey R. Holland, “Lord, I Believe”, April 2013, General Conference)
President Ghent also mentioned that the office for the new mission
is expected to be ready by the middle of June and it will be our duty in the
office to prepare as much of it as we can with files, supplies and other needed
items as we can. At least it’s going to
be conveniently located above us on the 7th floor so we won’t have
far to go. We need to also clone many of our files on the computer so that they
won’t have to start from scratch. He
said that the first part of May we will have another set of AP’s and a set of
office Elders to be trained for the new mission. We are going to be very crowded and busy for
the next few months.
Saturday
night was the adult session of stake conference. You might remember me mentioning that our
ward Relief Society had been given the assignment to sing a couple of numbers. I wasn’t able to be to the practice we had on
Wednesday because I wasn’t feeling well.
From what Sis. Kaneen said the practice went very poorly. We met a little early, before the meeting, to
go over both songs. Surprisingly our songs turned quite well and added to the
meeting. These meetings are a bit hard
for me because I understand very little of what is said but the spirit is still
there and I can feel that.
Today
was the general session for Stake conference.
It was packed, a great feeling. I
was worried that it would be really hard to catch a taxi after, since there
were so many people who would be doing the same, but a major of them were
taking the ecovia (fast bus) so we were able to catch a taxi pretty
quickly.
This
afternoon was our Senior Group FHE at the Phelps. Elder Phelps had handed us a paper at stake
conference asking us to choose one or two conference talks to share. It turned into a very spiritual afternoon as
we shared those that were special to us and why. We talked a lot about how the world is
turning into such a wicked place, about how important it is for us to stand
firm in our faith and be a beacon to the world, to be something solid that
others who lose their way can came back to, when, what they thought would be
good, falls apart around them.
If
nothing else there are seldom dull moments in the office and plenty to do. Lynn sometimes laments that it was sure a lot
easier to work in the temple, not as many problems to deal with, or at least of
a different nature.
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