August 21, 2011

I got up this morning and slipped over to the office for about 45 minutes before going off to Church. The Syphus’ came for breakfast and used our Vonage phone to try to contact their 5 kids. After Church I had an appointment for an interview for a Patriarchal Blessing and then spent about an hour meeting with the Sypus’. I had gotten his name approved by the Area Presidency to call him to be my 2nd Counselor in the mission presidency and they asked me to take care of extending the call and setting him apart. I went over what he may be asked to do as a counselor and I set him apart in our living room. For mission presidency counselors, the handbook provides that the call is to be ratified in district conferences but you don’t need to wait until sustaining before setting them apart. At 3pm I went over to the office to begin temple recommend interviews. The first complication came when one of the members didn’t show up in the system and they brought the information to set up a membership record. We had Sister Barfuss there and we input the information into the Church System (her baptism and confirmation date which was over 2 years ago). I had asked our ward bishop for a copy of the temple recommend questions in Fijian. I thought I might ask members who felt uncomfortable with the interview in English to read along in Fijian. As it turned out, there were a few that were fine in English, there were some who really needed an interpreter so Elder Farley sat in on one interview and then the branch president of one of the branches sat in for all the members from his branch. The interpreters did use the written questions in Fijian as the starting point for their help interpreting what I was saying. We were able to complete 11 first time temple recommends and 2 renewal recommends. After finishing these interviews I got back to the house for dinner. We had invited the Syphus’ to be with us for each meal today since they got in Saturday night and really couldn’t get meals on Sunday without going out to eat. After dinner, we sat down and I showed them the orientation PowerPoint presentation that we show to all new missionaries. They seemed to like the orientation. I felt like it would be good for them to see what we say to the new missionaries even though they will not be expected to do the same schedule as the younger missionaries. We finished the day by going back over to the office to get them a printout of missionaries in New Caledonia including their pictures so that they could use that to help them get to know the missionaries. They will have a photo board at the office as an on-going help but we wanted them to get a head start. We left them to stay at temple patron housing around 9pm. This was a very full Sunday but didn’t seem like the typical Sunday.