September 7, 2011

Today was definitely a difficult day. I got up determined to finish reading my missionary letters for the previous week (since I’ve already received most of the letters for this week). I also wanted to get a good start on figuring out all the to-do’s I had from my week in Vanuatu. I stayed at the house until I had finished reading last week’s letters and got showered up and into the office by around 8:20 am. The morning was filled with projects, interruptions, e-mail’s and unscheduled interviews. I got some requests sent into the Area Presidency and some follow up e-mails for discussion. Finally, around 2:15 the assistants met with me to discuss the finalization of our transfers to occur next week. With the seven new missionaries coming for Fiji, we have quite a large transfer. We also firmed up dates for zone conferences, zone leader training counsel, and things Elder Farley should plan to do when he goes with us to New Caledonia. We also determined that they should begin communicating the transfer this evening in order to allow missionaries to make preparations. We made progress firming up our understanding of who is coming next week from which MTC, when they are scheduled to leave, and our schedule for orientation and interviews.

I also worked on a draft of the final transfers we discussed in Vanuatu for review by the Senior Zone Leaders and Elder Warner to see if they remembered anything differently than how we had firmed up the transfer yesterday. I began working on the transfer for New Caledonia as well. Part of the complication was the lack of information available on departure flights from Fiji to Vanuatu. Sister Barfuss made some good strides in getting a better handle on how to communicate with the various sources of flight information.

I then got Sister Barfuss to start a new project. I need to move the going home dates for several missionaries scheduled to go home in October. We had so many incoming and out-going dates for October that we weren’t going to have any flexibility for holding District Conferences in Vanuatu unless we moved some of those dates to consolidate departures. I think by the end of the day we had all 5 missionaries scheduled to go home in October rescheduled to come in on October 3rd or 4th and be leaving a few days later. This will free up the latter part of October for a District Conference in Vanuatu and to be able to go there for zone conferences.

I feel like I made some good progress today, however, I still have a lot of items identified in my various meetings in Vanuatu that I need to take action on in the next few days. During the evening, I made progress on getting plane tickets to go to Stake Conference weekend after next in Lautoka. This also included a hotel reservation for Saturday evening. Today I was reminded of how restrictive the availability of plane flights are for Fiji to Vanuatu and Fiji to New Caledonia. It appears that we will have some missionaries forced to stay here in Fiji for an extra few days because the flights to Vanuatu the following Saturday are all full and they will have to wait until the next Tuesday.