November 26, 2017

SOLID week

Plenty to write about this week. First off, we had a p day with President and Sister McSwain! It was our first official p day in...4 or 5 weeks I think?? Anyways it was our first this transfer (week 3). We went to Australia Zoo, it was sooooo fun. They also call it "the home of the crocodile hunter" because it's where Steve Irwin worked. His parents founded the zoo, but now his wife owns it, and their kids do a lot of stuff for it as well. While there I basically learned just how much Aussies revere Steve Irwin, and I don't blame them. That guy was a boss. We saw crocs and stuff but also other Australian animals like wombats and koalas, and I hadn't seen any of those before. Plus there was an area where you could go up to kangaroos in their natural habitat and pet them.

Tuesday and Wednesday were golden orientation. We had a HUGE group, like 15 or 16 new missionaries. That's always fun because we get to stay in a hotel overnight. 

Thursday was thanksgiving, and probably the coolest senior couple in the mission, the Clydes, invited us over for lunch with President and Sister McSwain, the senior couple Briggs (the mission doctor), and the senior couple the Bells (who are also the cooliest). I didn't have a thanksgiving dinner last year (or the year before, now that I think about it) so it was really good to have some good ol turkey which I haven't had much here in Australia. We played two truths and a lie as well.​​

Saturday we went to baptisms. My first area, Bracken Ridge, had a baptism for the first time in months so I got to go to that. Unfortunately hardly anyone I knew was there and the investigator was one I never knew. But, yeah anyways! That night our Fijian-Indian companion Elder Sharma made us some sweeet Indian food.

Today we had coordinating council meeting which was like 5 hours long. But it's interesting to listen to the kind of topics the area seventy, the temple president, the mission president, and all the stake presidents discuss.

As for proselyting this week, we visited our recent converts the Mahns. Thaw, the oldest of the three that got baptized, got the priesthood this last Sunday and we're helping him get to the temple. Today we went to contact a couple member records move-ins and a referral and it was surprisingly successful. We got a commitment to come to church and a return appointment out of it. Hooray! Anyways. That was our week. Cheers!

Elder Cummings​

November 17, 2017

This week's email

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)

November 8, 2017

A weekannahalf

Well it's been a while, and for good reason. Last week was week 6 of the transfer, this was week 1, so us office blokes have been here there and everywhere.

Last week was kind of a blur. President was gone most of the week at a mission president's seminar in Fiji. But when he got back we had a quick MLC on Thursday. It was really frustrating because as usual we had the far north queensland zone leaders/sister training leaders skyping in but our internet connection kept dropping and annoying both them and us. But it worked out. One of the pictures is of me and Elder Bullock, my son (my trainee). He's been a zone leader for a couple transfers now but haven't gotten a picture with him. After the MLC we had a FHE with the Centenary and Ipswich zones. In our mission if a zone breaks their goals for baptisms they get a zone p-day and a FHE with President. So it's kind of like a full day p-day. This month we had HEAPS of zones break their baptismal goals so we had two zones on Thursday and two on Friday. Friday was Brisbane and Logan zones. That one we were officially a part of since we're in the Brisbane zone and we were responsible for 3 of the 5 baptisms our zone had a goal of for the month. 

Saturday we picked up our new companion, Elder Sharma! Super rad missionary. He's from Fiji and now he's in a trio with me and Elder Morris as the office elders. Elder Morris will most likely be on his way out next transfer so he's training Elder Sharma as an office elder.

Monday (just a couple days ago) was the first day of the transfer, so we had all sorts of missionaries running around kangaroo point chapel parking lot. All went smoothly...for the most part. I'm not sure how but somehow like 5 missionaries forgot their bikes. It happens every transfer, but usually not this many bikes. So we're like..."what the heck do we do with these????" 

Monday afternoon/evening was kind of fun/depressing (similar feelings I know) because we spend the rest of the day with the departing missionaries at the mission home. This transfer, two of my previous companions, Elder Rossi (who I was in a trio with way back in Atherton for one transfer about a year ago) and Elder Iufoni (who I was companions with just a few months ago, only for one transfer also) so it kind of sucks because it's like they're dying in your arms as you see them go through all the emotions of going home. Plus this one super cool Sister names Sister Costa from Brazil went home. She was serving in the same ward as us, and she's one of the coolest sisters I've met.

We had a departing devotional and stuff. Everyone goes around and bears their testimony at the end, and Elder Iufoni in his testimony said he learned how to "be loud" from me. Which is weird because he's a huge Tongan who's already loud enough but I think he was just being funny because I'm known as having a really loud voice, because the other missionaries laughed and a couple were like "ha, true." I think what he meant from it was teaching the gospel/bearing testimony in a loud and powerful voice or something. 

We didn't actually take them to the airport (well, the first few because it was like 5 in the morning) but we took a group later in the morning. Super sad. But it gets followed up by days like TODAY, WEDNESDAY when all the new goldens come in. We had 7 sisters and 4 elders arrive. A few from the states, one from NZ, another from Papua New Guinea, another from China.

We have lots of fun picking them up from the airport, then to the office, then to the mission home, and sending them off with their trainers. By the end of the day we're so exhausted. Anyways, this email has gotten long enough even though I wish I could say more. Because there's a lot more. But I'll end it there. See ya!

Elder Cummings

PS the pics are mostly from the last week, but the two of me/Elder Iufoni in the suits and me/Elder Rossi/Elder Hausia/KFC are from when we were companions.

October 29, 2017

whoop de doo

Wow, what a packed week and a half it's been! Some super cool stuff has been going on. First off, we had a baptism last weekend! We baptized three kids-two boys, Thaw and Su, and a girl, Sanda. They're three of the six kids of a family we've been teaching. I was really worried we wouldn't be able to work things out in time, but fortunately we have a ward mission leader who is SO on top of things, we sat down with him a few days prior and got everything for the program organized. Thank goodness! It was a super awesome baptism too, because half the ward came to support, since the ward hasn't seen a convert baptism in years. But it was all thanks to a member who reached out to a friend and asked if the missionaries could visit. See, people? It works! Go figure!

Most of this recent week was transfer deliberations, so we spent most of the time in the office while President and the assistants were holed up in President's office deliberating. They still haven't finished yet, because besides deliberating we (the office elders) were busy making a training presentation for President about Mission Leadership Councils which he has to give at a mission president's seminar in Fiji. Actually that's where he is right now. So it's up to the assistants to keep the mission running while President and Sister McSwain are gone for about a week. 

One night one of the Chinese branch members took us to a Chinese "yum cha" place where people come around with food carts and you take whatever you want. I tried some chicken feet! I haven't had that many weird foods in Australia so when I have the opportunity I try to take it. 

Wednesday was the ush-wings at Burrito Bar with President, the assistants, and an investigator Jeffrey.

Thursday we ran heaps of errands running desks to flats, buying paper, and of course my part time job lately has been repeatedly fixing errors on the printer/scanner in the office. Every time I come up with a solution, the solution stops working by the next day. Wahp. That night there was a serious hail storm warning so we did some emergency moving of cars around to take them under cover since there's various mission cars sitting around at the office and the mission home. That was fun.

Oh, of course something I should mention is that we got a new assistant. The two that are already here, Elder Smoot and Fukofuka, have both been my zone leaders at different points in my mission, but this last week they brought in a third assistant since the other two are going home soon-and it's Elder Hymas! Elder Hymas was my companion right before I myself came into the office! so that's really cool because it's almost like being companions again since we're with the assistants so much of the time.

Saturday was fun too, there was a stake Mormon Helping Hands project at a Buddhist temple. It was the first time I've been to a Buddhist temple so that was cool. One of the other Elders who was there is from China and he used to be buddhist so he filled us in on a lot of their beliefs, which are pretty cool. 

So that's how things have been going, which I would say are very good! Transfers are a week from today, so even though they're not done yet, I'm safe because that's what being is the office is like-I've only been here for 2 transfers and office elders stick around a lot longer than that-but there's a very high chance we'll be getting a new companion to train him in the way of the office elder. Deuces.

October 19, 2017

Yay free time to email

If you thought office work has lightened up at all in the last week and a half....you're wrong! Haha, we've been especially busy this last week+ because not only did we have golden orientation for the new missionaries but we (us and the assistants) had to road trip up to Rockhampton to swap out some cars for the missionaries up there. Plus we did zone conference while we were there. 

To start, the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday since I last wrote was mostly run-of-the-mill office work. Dropping off supplies and stuff. Tuesday we had to be at a chapel to help with interviews for a few of the zones. We were there from about 9 to 4 or 5. But president shouted us all KFC afterwards so it was alllll goods. Oh yeah, shouting someone means buying them food. Wednesday we were at interviews for a couple other zones.

Thursday was one of the things I look forward to...golden orientation! Where they take all the missionaries that came in this transfer and give them some trainings and experiences GQing and snapping gravity in the morning (snap gravity is just an ABM thing, it's the exercise we do in the morning). Really wish I would be smarter and take pictures, but oh well. 

Friday we finished up Golden orientation (no one freaked out about me filming them this time) we helped president with some training he was going to be doing at Rockhampton's district conference over the weekend, and then waited at the mission home to take President and Sister McSwain to the airport for them to fly up there. Then we went to the Chinese branch game night! Luckily we played Uno so I knew what was going on for the most part until someone would play a wild card so I had to ask them to translate the color they were changing it to.

Saturday was one of the greatest weeks for baptisms this year in the mission. We had 17 in one day across the mission! That is INCREDIBLE, especially because the last few weeks we've only had 5 or 6 a week. But before we went to baptisms we visited our investigator family from Burma, the Mahns. 3 of the 5 kids of baptismal age are super ready to get baptized. We are so lucky to be teaching them!

For the rest of Saturday Elder Morris went with Elder Fukofuka and I went with Elder Smoot to go to baptisms. We went to one in Kuraby where I had to conduct last minute. I don't mind conducting but I'm the literal worst at singing. We went to a couple poly baptisms, we got to have a mighty feed after one of them. 

That night we started upon our road trip to Rockhampton. We had to drive a total of 4 cars so each of us drove a car (yes, by ourselves, and yes, the mission president was well aware of it). Me and Elder Smoot drove to Hervey Bay, one of his previous areas, and Elder Morris and Fukofuka drove to Bundaberg, one of Elder Fukofuka's previous areas. We started upon our journey 9:45 at night. We had PLANNED to leave at 7 but good old Elder Smoot lost his wallet so we had to find that.

The road trip to Hervey Bay was about as fun as you would expect driving 3 1/2 hours in the middle of the night during pouring rain. It was bad. I had to stay awake by ringing Elder Smoot and drinking-please don't gasp-Coca Cola. It was a necessary sacrifice. We ended up getting to the Hervey Bay elders' flat about 2 am. Slept like a rock. I did get a picture with them so I'll attach it. We went to church in the Hervey Bay ward so Elder Smoot could see old recent converts and members. Then we embarked once more to finish our journey. This time though we left one of the cars in Hervey Bay (since that was one of the ones we were swapping) and just drove in one car up to Rocky. Meanwhile, Elder Fukofuka and Elder Morris went to church in Bundaberg and carpooled the rest of the way.

Actually I forgot, before we went the rest of the way to Rocky me and elder smoot drove to Bundaberg and met the other guys there and had lunch with an eternal investigator there. THEN we drove the rest of the way to Rockhampton which was about 4 or 5 hours. One way it's 616 km, or about 350 mi. That's about the distance from SLC to Las Vegas. The reason it takes so much longer is because 

1. It was raining hard-out the entire drive and

2. The top speed limit here is only like 60-65 mi an hour, even on the loneliest highways. And you can't speed because they even go through the courtesy of installing speed cameras in the middle of nowhere.

That night we got to Rocky and met up with the Rockhampton/Gladstone Elders and the Emerald sisters at a setting apart of a missionary that President McSwain was doing. We had dinner there too. I'll attach a picture of us outside. 

Monday was zone conference for Rockhampton. I had a bad headache the whole time. Then we swapped cars and headed back out as soon as conference was over. Took from about 3 to 1 in the morning. We split off again on the way down so that Elder Fukofuka and Elder Morris could grab the old Bundaberg car and me and Elder Smoot grabbed the old Hervey Bay car to drive it down. The drive down was actually much better, I drove for 2 1/2 hours of the leg to Hervey Bay and then obviously the full 3 1/2 hours down to Brisbane since I was driving alone. But I didn't get tired at all on the way down so it was cool. 

Tuesday we got to go to district meeting for the first time in weeks. We saw the Mahns again to prepare them for their baptism this Saturday. Then Tuesday night we picked up a missionary from the airport who was returning to the field to Perth after spending a few months back home on medical release. He stayed with us over night after we smashed some KFC in the mission home. But also the assistants (Elder Fukofuka and Elder Smoot) and President and Sister McSwain all flew up to Cairns Tuesday morn.

Wednesday was a fun day, because we had three new missionaries come in mid transfer, and since everyone was up in Cairns, it fell on us to do everything! So after seeing Elder Oemcke off to Perth we picked up the new missionaries and took them back to the office for the senior missionaries to orient them on stuff. Then we did heaps of driving taking missionaries to their new areas. Ultimately that's what we spent the whole day doing. All three went to the Chines-speaking program so we went down to Sunnybank, which is basically mini-China in Brisbane, and ate some awesome dumplings. 

Thursday (today) we did some hard office work for President's training that he's going to be giving at a mission president's seminar in Fiji in a couple weeks. Then we met with our WML to organize the Mahn's baptism and then went to the Mahn's to teach them the Word of Wisdom and get their parental permission for baptism. Unfortunately the only reason the parents' aren't getting baptized is because they don't speak any English and the Church doesn't really have any materials in their language, and their kids' translation abilities only go so far. But we're still super excited! Found out something cool: while we were filling out the baptismal records, I learned from the Mahn's that in Burma (or Myanmar) they don't have last names, so when they came to Australia they were assigned a last name. Interesting fun fact! That's pretty much catching you all up. I know it's heaps, and I wish I had more pictures, but that's the way the news goes. Cheers!

Elder Cummings

ps I attached a map of our road trip for your convenience. Also, on the way back down we actually had to take a couple detours because roads were closed due to flooding.

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 ​