September 9, 2011

Last night I broke the treadmill! After walking at a relatively calm pace for just under 30 minutes, the treadmill stopped! It hasn’t run since.

I got up today and got a phone call from Church travel in Salt Lake. We have a young man who is coming to Vanuatu from Guyana. He couldn’t get a visa to go to the Provo MTC so he has been in the MTC in the Dominican Republic. In order for him to get a flight to Fiji, he needs to fly to LA and change planes to go to Fiji. They were even having a problem getting him a transit visa to simply change planes in the U.S. It seems that he successfully obtained a transit visa yesterday. The President of the Dominican Republic MTC was very anxious to get this elder on his way. His group left 2 days ago, he is the only English speaking missionary in that MTC and he has no companion! The challenge is that we didn’t yet have his visa for Vanuatu. I called Elder Warner (even though it was 6 am his time) and he told me that they were expecting to pick up his visa today. They had told him that everything was in order and they just needed the signature on the papers and they could have them.

The challenge (and the opportunity) was that if we could get his ticket bought by tomorrow, he could fly to LA and catch the same plane that 11 other missionaries are catching from the Provo MTC to come here. He would then be right in the middle of our big “in-take”. Since today is Friday here, if we didn’t get that visa today, we wouldn’t have it until it was too late to get this Elder to LA (Salt Lake was insistent that no ticket would be purchased until we had the Vanuatu visa even though we knew that he would actually be entering Vanuatu for another 10 days or so. As it turned out, the person responsible for signing the visa paperwork didn’t come in this morning. The Warners went back in the afternoon and at 4:50 our time I spoke with Elder Warner and he told me he had been called to come down and pick up the paperwork at 4pm their time (in 10 minutes). At 5:19 pm Vanuatu time, the e-mail was sent to Salt Lake and the Dominican Republic MTC with the documents they need to allow them to get his plane ticket to come with the large group from Provo! (whew!) That was one interesting horserace!

I spent most of the day working on several projects. I worked on summarizing the to-do list I had generated based on my meetings in Vanuatu. I also followed up on several of the to-do items and “ticked them off the list”. I worked on updating my list of missionaries serving, waiting for calls, preparing to submit missionary papers, and those on hold from our mission. This was a very helpful process in order for me to get my arms around which missionaries had been submitted and yet we had not yet heard of their calls (I sent some follow up e-mails to our contact in the Area Office to inquire about the status of those.) I also followed up on several requests I had sent to the Area Office last month but had not yet heard back. Fortunately I did that follow up in that one of the requests for approval had slipped through the cracks. I also worked on planning for zone conferences in New Caledonia, Fiji, and Vanuatu which will all take place over the next 5 weeks.

The assistants and I met to go over ideas for topics for our upcoming Zone conferences including training sessions they could prepare and present. We agreed that the assistants would join us in Vanuatu as well as Elder Farley going with us to New Caledonia. In that way the assistants would be able to present training at all three “sub-missions”. I also prepared a calendar for the visit to New Caledonia and sent the Zone Leaders in New Caledonia agendas for Zone Leader Training Council and Zone Conference as well as indicating all the meetings I was scheduled to attend related to the District Conference scheduled there with a visiting authority. I felt like I made a lot of progress on that front today.

I also got tickets for Jan and me to go to Vanuatu from October 15th through October 25th. We will attend two District Conferences (one on the 15th and 16th and the other on the 22nd and 23rd). I sent an e-mail to the District President of the second conference confirming with him that we are planning on having that conference on that date. I sent a draft of the agenda to Elder Warner for his comments. I also sent Elder Warner a draft memo requesting Area Presidency approval to create a “group” from one of the branches in Vanuatu. When a group of saints currently attending a branch would benefit from establishing a group to meet closer to their home, the Church now calls that a ”group”. Interestingly enough, in order to begin such a group, we have to have Area Presidency approval.

At lunch time I came back to the house and set up a new printer/scanner/copier that Jan had bought that morning (our IT person told her it would be okay). Now we have the capability to print in our study. The printer is a color ink-jet printer. One functional help this will provide is the ability to scan to a pdf file. Our scanners in the office cannot create this very common format of document and it has been a hassle on more than one occasions when trying to deal with Area Presidency communications.

I truly felt very engaged all day today and felt very productive. However, by the time Jan and I went home at 7pm I was very drained. After dinner, however, I got a second wind and spent about 2 hours trying to work with Pivot Tables on the data we have for each proselyting area. I worked on it long and hard but didn’t come up with any innovative new ways to slice the data “yet”. I hope to get there sometime this weekend however so that our zone conferences this time will have a little more of a discussion on accountability than what we had during the mission tour in July.

I think that if I could be as focused and energized each day as I was today, I would really feel like I was getting somewhere. Unfortunately, more often than not, I feel like I’m running a marathon in a swimming pool. Today was a very productive day!