July 31, 2011

Today is the last day of the first full month of our mission. I sent the talk I translated last night to my French tutor hoping that she will look it over and make any corrections she thinks would be appropriate. Jan had found several great missionary stories she had marked for me to read in Gerald Lund’s book Divine Signatures. I read those before Church. Since our church meetings start at 9am, we are finished with meetings in good time. Jan and I were both asked by the Bishop to make a few remarks at the beginning of our combined Priesthood and Relief Society meeting (5th Sunday lesson). He also announced to everyone that we were having a missionary fireside the following Sunday at 5pm and President and Sister Klingler would be the speakers. I knew that he had asked me to speak via one of our missionaries the previous Sunday. However, I didn’t realize he wanted Jan to speak as well. Consequently, this was the first she had heard of it. We both agreed it was better to learn about it this Sunday rather than next J. After lunch and making a couple of phone calls, I went over to the mission office to prepare for a meeting with the Assistants at 4pm to go over training agenda’s and needs. We spent about 2 and ½ hours determining what training should happen and what topics we might discuss. I went over some training concepts I wanted to address with the Zone Leaders and with the broader Leadership Training Group. We also reviewed the calendar for receiving two Sisters from the Provo MTC who had come to work in Vanuatu. The come in Tuesday evening and we will have our interviews, orientation, and temple trip with them on Wednesday. I got back to the house about 6:30 and we had dinner. We discussed training ideas and suggestions she had identified and then I got out the laptop and began trying to graph the weekly results for missionary work. I created several graphs that help illustrate trend for each Key Indicator as the Church calls the information we report to them each week. I did graphs for each Zone as well as for the whole of Fiji. Tomorrow I will do the same for the zones in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. I ran out of time as the graphing exercise took me until about 10:15pm. Hopefully, I will be able to settle in to a reasonable schedule as to the hours I should work. I’m not really the 80 hours a week type :).