I'm not totally sure when the last time I emailed was because for some reason by last group email isn't showing up in my "sent mail" folder. that's the hard thing about sporadic emailing, I can never remember when the last time was without checking!!
Guess I'll start from last Saturday? We had a church activity with all the ward mission teams in the stake...playing the epic game of LAWN BOWLS. How it works is your team tries to roll their 8 balls as close as possible to a ball on the other side of the field. The balls are slightly flattened on one side so they curve, which makes it harder to adjust for it. It was fun. Kind of like bocce ball. It's known as an old person's game here.
Monday was my birthday...yay! The mission president's wife made me a pile of cinnamon rolls and the office sung happy birthday while I wore the birthday crown. Sister McSwain took a video so I'll try to get it from her. Some sisters that used to be in my zone came by for their companion to take an English test.. One of them is Peruvian and she gave me a sweet alpaca wool tie and a tie pin. And a Peruvian cake. That night we went to a really good burger place called Burger Fuel.
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday followed a pretty similar structure, because me and this Peruvian sister-k her name is Sister Robles-were chosen to do a musical number for our mission tour on Friday. Oh yeah. Monday night President got word that O. Vincent Haleck, the area president, and Elder Uceda (president of the seventy) were coming to tour the mission, so we had to do HEAPS of changes to our transfer schedule to accomodate it, since we were planning on having zone conferences, and we had to change that and combined the mission tour and zone conferences into one day for the whole mission. SO me and Sister Robles (who plays the cello) were selected to play a musical number.
Tues-Thurs was pretty much do office stuff for President 10-2, practice musical number with Sister Robles from 2-4:30 or so, then back to the office. Well Wednesday we also went to a mall to find cell phones for missionaries. You would not BELIEVE how hard it is nowadays just to find simple phones that only text and call, don't have any fancy features, and yet are functional. It seems like all the phones we can find are either smartphones or phones that break after a couple weeks. Hopefully those changes the church was talking about with more missions having smartphones will come here and I won't have to deal with this stress, haha.
Thursday night we had dinner with Sue, a really cool recent convert from China at a mongolian bbq place. I had this yougurt drink that tasted...really sour and yet sweet and yougurty at the same time. I would not have been surprised if it was yak milk yogurt or something but I don't know. After that we were at Karawatha chapel for a couple hours cleaning it for the big day.
So Friday (yesterday) was the mission tour itself. It took more preparation than usual because I thought "hey, we used to broadcast stake conferences back home to other chapels, maybe we can broadcast the mission tour to the missionaries up north who can't come." The office elders had tried to broadcast mission tours using skype before, but apparently it sucked. I wanted to try using the church's broadcast system. So I called a guy President referred me to, who referred me to a couple stake tech guys, who showed up Friday morning to help us set it all up. I was really nervous it wouldn't work because since the church's system asks that you reserve a broadcast event at least a week before, but since we didn't even know about the mission tour until just a couple days before, we weren't sure they were going to be able to get the servers ready for us. plus one of the stake tech guys waited until the night before to reveal the tiny little notice that they hadn't actually had a 100% successful broadcast before due to overheating of the equipment. HOWEVER I am glad to report it all went pretty well. The missionaries up north said the video got a bit dodgy sometimes but the audio was perfect. Yaaaaaaay
Elder Uceda gave some great lessons on baptizing converts by focusing on working with missionary minded members and not worrying about changing the attitudes of members that aren't as keen. Plus he talked about "establishing the church" and how we do that by focusing on prospective elders, older teens and ysa rather than focusing too much on 9 or 10 year old unbaptized kids. I can say he's really energetic. After the mission tour the general authorities left and we had a mission wide zone conference. Oh yeah guess I should say the musical number went really well, the practice paid off. Plus I wore my Peruvian tie and Elder Uceda and Sister Uceda pointed it out when we were shaking their hands. yeaaaaah I'm in with the brethren. We got to see him again later because we went to Chinese branch game night and he was at the same chapel for a meeting or something, so we got to have a bit of personal interaction with him because it was just him, Elder Walker (an area seventy) and 6 or 7 of us missonaries in the foyer. Cool stuff. Oh yeah. I'll attach a picture of a cover I made for my daily planner (since we don't have tablets we use physical planners :P) Points for each book of mormon hero you can guess correctly. Also a picture of the office crew (3 office elders and 4 assistants). Plus lawn bowls pictures. Plus me and Sister Robles. Catch you next time (I would say next week but things might not work out that way lol)
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