Friday, April 29, 2011

Week 13 in the Mission Office

So, now this mission stuff is turning out to be a little harder.  He couldn’t even think of a good movie quote for a subject this week!  Hah!

Subject:  Some kind of generic movie quote

Wow. This stuff is hard. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that before, but it is. This last week was a lot more mentally hard than I think just about any other week in my mission so far. It was changes week, so Monday we didn’t even work in our areas. The Monday of changes week we always work all day in the office. There’s just too much to do. But then on Tuesday we had the new missionary meeting. Everything that I personally had to do went really smoothly, but things just kept coming up and people kept forgetting things, or not listening and causing us problems. For example, all of the zone leaders were supposed to stop by the office and drop off their baptismal records. Not a single one did. Since that was for a report that was due on Thursday, there were problems. Also, an Elder called us from our house, while we were thirty minutes away at this meeting, angry at us for not being at the house to give him a fridge. Since we knew absolutely nothing about that, we tried to calm him down and figure out what happened. As it turns out, one of the assistants had told his zone leader that he could have our fridge. The zone leaders told this Elder, who apparently took it to mean that if he showed up at our house during the new missionary meeting we would all be there waiting for him, holding the fridge, likely filled with candy and ice cream, on our shoulders. Since that was obviously not the case, we had to deal with that.

The point is, the meeting was stressful. And then after it, we went back to the office and worked for several hours. It meant that we left super late and only worked for one hour in our area. Wednesday we worked in the office like normal, but just as we were about to leave President asked us to do some more stuff. And then Hermana Lopez asked us to do some stuff. We ended up leaving the office around seven thirty or eight, so we didn’t even have time to get to our area, let alone work in it. We tried working in Campestre, where we live, but the members we tried to contact weren’t home. Thursday we left late as well, but actually got to work in our area for a couple hours. The problem Thursday came when we tried to take the bus home and ran into construction. The bus took a detour, which apparently in Spanish means cutting a huge chunk off of your normal route and not stopping until you make sure that you’re about an hour of walking away from the missionaries’ house. Now, on top of all that we had ten missionaries staying at our house one night, six more the next night, and twenty two the night after. And we were receiving some Elders from the East mission (about 40) to start the transition over. And a bunch of Elders got emergency changes into my area because President decided it would be good for them to learn the area and work there all day. And we’re going to be moving into the tiniest house I’ve seen in my entire life, and will have at least six missionaries there. Just picture Lindsay’s old tiny house, but a little smaller and minus the hot water, washing machine and dryer, and in El Salvador. And to finish it all off, I can’t think of anything to write as my subject line. Oh well. I’ll probably end up putting up some kind of generic movie quote. So that’s the stuff that happened this week. I don’t like referring to it as the bad stuff, though. I think it’s more like the stuff I’ll use for my stories when I’m a grandpa.

Now for the other side of the coin. Last P-Day we went bowling, which was super fun. I won the first game (Latins aren’t too good at that sport, as it turns out) and Elder Oliverson won the second. But just barely. And it was cool because they turned it into a cosmic bowling kind of thing, so you can just imagine how awesomely black lights mix with white shirts and ties. We got a bunch of pictures and videos and such. I didn’t get the chance to upload them, but I will soon. And I was also thinking about sending home a DVD with all of the videos and pictures that I’ve taken so far, so I’d include it all on that. We had some good times in the office. That was another cool thing this week. Elder Oliverson got three packages and has been sharing the goods so to speak, so that’s also a plus. I also finished my second journal now and am still faithfully writing every day. And by every day, of course, I mean that I make sure that I write a full one page entry for each day, even though I sometimes do it the morning after. I have two things that I just thought of that I want to mention really fast. First, my belt broke the other day, so that might be a good thing to send off in the Christmas package. And some more of those Dri-Max socks. I really like those socks, but they’ve been slowly disappearing lately. The other thing that I would mention is about the whole Mother’s Day thing. I think that this time I will only be able to use a phone, and it will be some time on Sunday. I’m really pretty flexible about the time, but it will either be in the morning or at night. I just need to know about what time would work best for y’all. In this case a conference call might also be worth looking into. But obviously I’d have to make a Mom call first.

Mom and Dad’s emails were really plump full of juicy information this week. I quite enjoyed that. It seems like things have been quite lively the past week. Happy Birthday Michael, by the way. 18 is ridiculous. It’s a fun age. You’ll have to let me know how that’s working out for you. I kind of want to see some pictures of this crater in the McDonalds’ driveway. That sounds pretty awesome. I also had a dream last night that we went to visit them, but the twins were like two years old, so that also is weird. As is the random bumping-in-to of Sister Pappas’s parents. I don’t know her super well, but I do remember when she came in. That was my first change in the office. And I also happen to know off the top of my head that she is in Sonsonate with Elder Duzett and has at least one package and three letters in the office right now which I will send off to her on Tuesday. There might be more, but I don’t think there are. I’m usually pretty on top of that. Also, it’s super crazy that you ran into Sarah Miskell there in Seaside. Say hi to her for me, by the way, if you randomly run into her and Brian again.

Wow. It just started raining and storming (is that a verb?) super hard all of the sudden. It’s kind of freaking me out. That’ll be fun to work in today. Which reminds me that I should probably buy a new umbrella. The one I have is rusted shut. Oh, and that gives me the perfect time to comment on the tornado business that’s going on. It sounded super scary that that is going on over there in good ol’ De Rurange County, but I think we all came out of this as better people. But seriously, I’m glad everyone is fine.

Okay, I’ve got to go. I hope you all have a great week, and I’ll definitely remember Grandma in my prayers!

Elder David Arrington

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