September 8, 2011

Today was a good catch up day. I got to work early and began preparing in detail for our new missionaries coming next week. We got the going home dates and transportation arranged for all the missionaries scheduled to go home in October in order to free up the last 2 weekends of October for travel and district conferences. I also worked on zone conference and zone leader training counsel agenda’s for this set of trips through the mission.

I was also able to identify several Area Presidency approval requests sent in mid-August that we have not yet heard about. I sent follow up e-mails to the executive secretary for those items. I prepared a “mail-merge” letter set up to inform new missionaries of their first assignment. The letter includes the area and district name as well as the companion name for the missionary. The letter is given to the missionary after our orientation meeting (and after initial interviews). It is also sent, along with a picture of the missionary and Jan and I to the parents. With 20+ missionaries next week, it will be important to have done a lot of leg work before they get here. Since we have identified all trainers in this transfer, all I will need to do after the interviews is match the appropriate new missionary with each trainer. With this tool, I just need to put the name of the new missionary in the right slot and then merge the data file with the letter to get 20+ letters giving each new missionary their assignment and the name of their trainer.

We worked on updating the missionary boards (the one in the outer office and the one in my office) to reflect the three transfer groups (Fiji, New Caledonia, and Vanuatu). I finalized the transfers for each group and they are communicating those transfers either today or tomorrow with the effective date of the transfer being next week.

I feel like I made very good progress today. However, there are not very many days left before our trip to New Caledonia and I do have much to do in preparation. I know that once next week comes, the days will rush by with half the missionaries coming in on Monday and the other half Tuesday. We also have a stake conference weekend after next just before the day we leave for New Caledonia. To add to my concerns, I’ve picked up 5 pounds since the mission started! I need to make time to get some exercise in. I will try by starting tonight.