Feb. & March - A blur of activity!

Julene just shared some of our activity in the past 6 weeks.  We are working as hard as we did fixing up our yard before we left for this mission.  We are exhausted by the time we get home.  But, it is very satisfying.

To clarify what we have talked about in our last post, the missionaries who speak English often are sent to a country where they have to learn a second language.  They return home with life-changing spiritual experiences from serving wonderful people, and they return with the gift of an additional language they can use in work opportunities.  The General Authorities of the Church have recommended for years that the non-English speaking missionaries should also use their study time to learn English.  The Companionship Language Study program was created to assist them to do that.  However, most of the non-English speaking missionaries have not made the effort to do that.  It is hard; I know.

As one of the earlier posts showed, we are trying to help motivate those missionaries to give the effort.  We have gathered stories of missionaries who have done the program and seen important changes take place in their lives.  Every two weeks, we give a presentation to the new missionaries who have arrived at the Lima MTC.  Julene created a fun, interactive activity that shows them that learning English can be done in a fun way.

However, we have learned that it all starts with the mission president.  If he places great emphasis on the missionaries using part of their study time to practice speaking English, it makes a great difference on the young missionaries willingness to try, and to stick with it.  They will be the future Church leaders in their home countries.  So, this last month we created the following emailed flyer to help encourage the 30 mission presidents in this Area.  However, just as we were getting ready to send the flyer, we received an email from the Martinos in the Philippines, to whom we were divinely guided by our friends the Thelers.  The Martinos story HAD to be our cover letter to the flyer (all these materials were sent in Spanish and English):

We then sent this 2 page flyer:

We then attached Elder Uchtdorf's challenges and blessings from learning English:

Julene and I have been a great team.  She created the Excel document, that automatically totals the test scores in the right hand column.  The missions love it!  I took some photos and captured web images to create the flyers.  The prompting that led me to Elder Uchtdorf's experience with learning English was very clear and undeniable.  We are learning completely new lessons about what "having faith" means.

Then last week, the Area Presidency had a strong impression that the way to get greater faithfulness from some members in the Area, was to have families read the Book of Mormon starting right after General Conference.  They decided to create a sheet of bookmarks to encourage each family to read daily.  I was asked to be the graphic designer.

It all happened incredibly fast, since the Area Presidency has many things to cover before heading to General Conference tomorrow.  A sheet of 5 bookmarks, under a message to read the Book of Mormon daily, will go to every family in every ward and branch in the five countries.  They will be handed out on Sunday, April 13th.  That is hundreds of thousands of sheets being printed.  It is a big gamble to go with a volunteer amateur designer.  My Heavenly Father is teaching me even greater lessons in learning to rely on Him.  Below is what we just finished this afternoon.  (We originally created the attached sheet for our family, so you'll have to increase its size to be able to read the information on the sheet.)

Finally, a few of the sites where we live:

Our apartment is the one on the top floor —

The sidewalk in front of our apartment.  Hundreds of buses, cars, and dump trucks pass by each day.  We have to pass through the "narrow neck" of road (no sidewalk) each day on our way to the Area offices.  See the "narrow neck" in Julene's earlier post.

And, a portion of downtown Lima — near a "VERY" large upscale shopping mall.

Well . . . if you've stayed awake this far, don't stop now.  Read Julene's post below!

We will try to be better at updating the blog more often.

We love and miss all of you, and hope you are doing very, very well! ! !

Who said a mission was easy?

And who said it was easy to keep up a blog, especially when you are not very good at writing. So my goal of getting on and writing down experiences at least weekly was quickly shot down. So how about if my new goal is whenever I can. I like that kind of commitment.

Life at the area office is crazy! It is a continual round of deadlines, changes, more deadlines and more changes. Val has especially been busy creating stuff. You saw a lot of the things that he did for the Companionship Language Study program. We were able to present the material to all of the mission presidents in a training session. We hope that what has been created will help them to implement the English program. We feel like with the support from the Area Presidency and the General Authorities, the mission presidents are really trying to put more emphasis on getting missionaries to do it. We have also been reaching out to the wives because they are the ones that are tracking the missionary progress in learning English. I am currently trying to put together a Newsletter - what am I thinking when I can't even do a little blog. I want it to be a place to share what is working among the missions and to celebrate the successes that are happening there. I also want to share stories from missionaries who have finished the program because so far they have good stories about how it has blessed their lives. We recently got a testimony from a returned missionary who basically told other missionaries that they needed to do it because they had been asked to by their leaders and because it had really helped him in his life. That's just one of the tender mercies.

While we were in the MTC we were in a district with two other couples. One was going to Russia and the other to the Philippines. The couple going to Russia was doing member support and the other couple was going to be working in the mission office. We have kept in contact with the couple in the Philippines. They recently sent an email saying that she had been asked to be in charge of the CLS program for their mission. Coincidence? We don't think so! So we have been sharing what we have been doing with her. We asked if she had any stories to share. She said no, but that she had heard of a mission that was having really great success so she put us in touch with Sister Deannie Martino, wife of the president of the Philippine Angeles Mission. She had some great stories of the success of the program in her mission. We got her information in time to share with the mission presidents. For some, I think it made them feel like we felt they were not doing enough. For others, we hope it will inspire them to know that they can do better. We really feel that if the mission presidents are behind this, then the missionaries will do it.

In the meantime, the area presidency, in an effort to support the goals of the work of salvation, decided to institute a scripture reading goal among all the church members in the area. That's over 400,000 heads of households. To encourage the members in reading the Book of Mormon, they wanted to give every member a book mark and reading chart on April 13th. So, I think you can guess who got the job of making the bookmark. That's right! The person that Elder Grow calls the area graphic department. He got the assignment last Friday and after about 15 revisions the final product was ready today. My job was to create a monthly reading chart on Excel which in and of itself had 10 revisions. Here's one of the tender mercies. We have had multiple people checking this, but at about 5:30, a worker found two spelling mistakes on my calendar. That's what happens when your Spanish is not too great. But the blessing is that someone found it in time before it went to press in five different countries.

We are learning how to get around in the big city. We are getting quite excellent at taking the bus. We know what to ask to get to where we need to go in most places. And we can hail a cab and get a pretty good price and tell them where we want to go. I even had a conversation with one cabby as we went across town to a party. I told him that I only speak in present tense so I hope he understood what I was saying. He acted like he did. We are settling into life here learning how to shop, get where we need to go, and safely walk to the office without getting smashed by a bus. Well, that's just a little bit of our lives. Okay, so it looks more like a book instead of a little blog.

Life is great!