Wednesday, October 11, 2017

October 8, 2017

Sorry bout that

So I planned on sending an email a few days ago, but I was feeling so wrecked I put it off. And now it's been like a week and a half since my last email, soo...yeah.
The weekend after I emailed last we had a p-day for once in a couple weeks. We went to one of the biggest shopping centers in Australia, a place called Pacific Fair. At first I was pretty cool with going. Sounded like a fun adventure. But in my haste I forgot how expensive clothes are, and so after about half an hour of being there I was so bored. We were going from store to store just saying "oh, this hat is cool.....40 dollars." "hey check out this cool t-shirt....oh, 60 bucks" "man this suit is sweet...400 dollars okay we're out of here" But we ended up hanging around for a few hours. It wasn't all a waste though, because we got some lunch which was pretty delicious, so ha.
This last week I don´t have much to report besides having zone conferences. Monday was spent all day preparing for them, getting supplies together and printing stuff out and all that, then Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were all at conferences. I really should've taken pictures with my previous comps but I'm pretty useless, ha. This last couple of days, we watched general conference. A week late, per the norm here in Australia. I really liked a couple of the talks. I noticed a lot of them talked about how we should never look down on others, church leaders, fellow members, or non members, based on perceived shortcomings. It´s never our place to discount others based on race, economic or social background, age, etc etc. We got to watch the Saturday sessions with the assistants and President and Sister McSwain at the mission home, which was fun. Except for priesthood session, I guess. We went to Kangaroo Point to watch that with the rest of the priesthood in the stake. I will definitely try to find interesting things to do this week. Actually well now that I think about it we´re taking a 8 hour road trip up to Rockhampton to swap a couple cars with the elders up there, so that´ll be fun. Yay!
Elder Cummings
 

September 28, 2017

Okee doke

Ok let me smash this out real fast. It's been longer than usual because this last week was week 6/week 1 of the transfer, so that comes with a looooot of work to do. Just last week we moved three flats, went to a couple baptisms, fun stuff. We didn't have time for a pday last week because we were also doing lots of office work getting ready to switch the mission over for transfers. Fun stuff! Because you are probably very interested, we do things like: update the contacts on the mission smartphones (only used by president and sister mcswain, the senior missionaries, us, the assistants, etc etc), update the "transfer board" or basically this document that has pictures of all the missionaries and what area they're in, make call sheets for all the zone leaders and sister training leaders, with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all the missionaries, organize supplies (Book of Mormons, pamphlets, mail, etc) to give to missionaries at transfers on Monday, stuff like that. 
Sunday was Elder Bank's last day as an office elder/being in the Enoggera area so we visited a few people for him to bid farewell to.
And then Monday, it all started. It was a big transfer this time around. Kangaroo Point (the chapel/temple where we meet) was swarming with missionaries. Luckily everything went well, there were no casualties and no missionaries that disappeared. The rest of the day we spent pretty much at the mission home with the departing missionaries. One of them, Elder Clawson, I served in the same district my first area so I've known him my entire mission, it's pretty weird to see him go. Elder Vea and I served in the same district for 5 transfers up north about a year ago, so we were pretty good friends. Tuesday was a relatively regular day in that we tried to cram as much office work as we could in a few hours since we weren't going to have any time Wednesday or Thursday to do it.
Wednesday was the big day when the new missionaries come in. This intake was a good size. A couple of Americans, a Canadian, an Australian, a couple Chinese, a couple Fijians. Good bunch. Basically how that works is we pick them all up from the airport, bring them to the mission office, take them to the bank to withdraw money for their bikes, they get oriented on driving and fill out heaps of paperwork at the office, we take them to the mission home, they have lunch, then a meeting with President and Sister McSwain, they meet their trainers, we take pictures, they get their bikes, take their cars, and go. By the time all was said and done it was about 5 or so. That night we had to prepare for MLC which was yesterday. We were up til two in the morning getting ready for it.
MLC was really good, we had it at Karawatha, the biggest chapel in the mission, as opposed to where we usually have it at Kangaroo Point, which is one of the smallest. There was a couple technical problems in that we forgot a soundboard which is something we really need for those but other than that it all went well. Going it alone without Elder Banks, who was an office elder for 10 months, just means it was inevitable something would go wrong at some point. Here is a video I made when I was bored ​