Aloha family. Here is what we learned this week…
As winter has decided to give-in to spring we have noticed some changes, inside and outside. This picture was sunset on Monday night. We actually have tons of sunsets like this, but I usually don’t pay as much attention to them when it is cold outside and I don’t plan to go out there to take a picture. But the temperature was nice and the sunset was pretty cool, so out onto our balcony I went to get this shot.
We started the day going into the library at 8:30 and jumped right into our routine. It is nice to have the light return to our morning walk and it makes us feel more awake and ready for the day.
As we walked to the COB for lunch we learned that they had closed North Temple St. and had moved the large concrete barricades in front of the temple construction area. So I took this shot. They were having a bunch of concrete trucks come in as well as moving in some other structural materials. It is definitely moving along, even though it feels like it has taken forever. Those two concrete buildings that you see there will be the new entrance to the temple, we also learned they will be lobby areas where wedding parties can gather and families can wait. They are just walls now, but have finally started to get framing for where windows and doors will go.
The afternoon was fairly normal except that I got to help two Ethiopian sisters who came into the library. I learned from them that Ethiopia uses a different calendar than we do. In their calendar it is currently 2016. Their new year begins on September 11th and they have 13 months, 12 months with 30 days each and 1 month with 5 days, or 6 days if it is a leap year. Pretty wild. They also use a different alphabet, Ge’ez, which looks a lot like Hebrew. They were YSA aged girls who now lived in Germany with their brother. They were visiting for conference with a couple whose parents had served a senior mission in Germany and I learned that their mission president was Christian Fingerle who I have become friends with through my association with him as an area director in Seminaries and Institute. Small world. I was able to teach them how to use the resources we have to do family history work, but we discovered there are very few resources online and they need to know places in order to search the records. So they were going to contact their mom to get more info as to where to start. She still lives in Ethiopia and is not a member of the Church, but is interested in family history.
That evening I, just before closing, was asked to help a guest with Norway research. That turned out well as I learned that I have learned enough about Norway research to really help others learn how to do it. There was no FHE that night so I got to come home and watch the final game for March Madness…UConn verses Purdue. It was a pretty close battle the first half, but in the second half UConn pulled away and with every Purdue surge they were able to push it back and win pretty convincingly. Great game.
Tuesday was Pday, but as it seems to be the case lately we had to go in and work for awhile. We learned on Saturday that a group of people from Tahiti were coming in at 9:00am and only their leader spoke good English. So I was at the front lobby at 9am, along with one of the four missionaries who we have that speak French, and waited for them to come. They of course were on
island time and didn’t make it until about 9:30. I introduced ourselves and spoke with their leader and we decided that they would like a tour first so I ran downstairs to get one of our missionaries who is trained to do tours and she took Elder Campbell, a French speaker, to translate and off they went. They ended on the B2 floor where we sat
them all down in the computer lab there and did a basic presentation of how to get on
FamilySearch, which we learned they all had opened an account with…their leader is a member of the Church, and had taught them all how to get an account so they were ready to go. I learned that they were all related and one of their members had been doing genealogy work for over 20 years and had over 30,000 names in her tree. Wow! She wanted to transfer them from the program she was using into
FamilySearch but we had to tell her that there was no easy way, unfortunately, to do that. I had previously learned that the only way is to import a GEDCOM file and then individually
verify the information on each person and then add them to your tree. It is almost as long and tedious as manually entering each person. I left them in the hands of our four French speaking missionaries and took off to go to our Dutch paleography class. After that I did a quick check on our Tahitian group and then it was lunch in the COB and home to finally relax. The rest of the day was pretty laid back. Mom went for a walk up around the capital and learned that winter has indeed left the building as all of the cherry trees around the capital are in full bloom. We just relaxed until I took off to give platelets. The lady that stuck me missed on both arms. They had to re-stick my left arm and re-adjust the needle in my right arm. But once that was done all went well. I watched a movie about two sisters who were swimmers and fled Syria during their civil war. The one sister had a dream to swim in the Olympics and once they made it to Germany, which involved a stealth trip in a leaky 8 man raft with 16 people in it, and her and her sister having to swim for 3 hours pushing and pulling the raft until it made it across the Mediterranean Sea to the shore of Lesbos, she found a club to swim with and was able to go to the Rio Olympics as a member of the
Refugee Olympic Athletes team. She actually was able to win one heat there.
Wednesday we had to go in early again for
DNA Class Part II. That went well and we then spent the rest of the morning helping in the library. After lunch we went over to the Conference Center to see if we could get some Books of Mormon (or is it Book of Mormons?) in a bunch of different languages to have in the library. We talked to a couple of sisters at the reception desk and they sent a message to a mission leader asking if it was ok. Mom left her name and phone number with them and off we went. We had just exited the library when we got a phone call saying it was ok, we could get some books. So we went back and were able to get about 15 copies in different languages. Wahoo! Now we will be able to have some books to give to guests when they ask for them. We didn’t get every language, just the main ones that we seem to get the most visitation from. We should have had a bunch of French ones for our Tahitian group from the day before, but I think their leader has already taken care of a making sure they have one.
On the way out of the Conference Center I was able to see the 8th Wonder of the World, well at least that is what Jimmy, our tour guide on the
Jungle Cruise ride called it. Yes, you are right…
the backside of water! It wasn’t Schweitzer Falls that you get to see on that ride, instead it is from this window that looks out from inside the Conference Center right through the waterfall that comes down from on top of the building. It’s kind of mesmerizing to look at. The rest of our day was pretty normal until just before closing when I was asked to help a guest with Norway research. This is becoming a trend it seems. Again I was pleased to learn that I knew enough to help.
Thursday began with reading a book we were asked to read for our
off-site training meeting that we were having the next day for all of the zone leaders in the mission. It was written by one of our zone leaders and is expected to be published in August. As you can see from the picture we got an advanced copy, which is not
publish-ready yet. It is a pretty good look at what and how God has asked us to establish Zion. I can’t say I totally agreed with all of his predictions of how it will happen, but it was fun to see someone’s ideas. As I was reading I was reminded of a stake presidency counselor’s talk in stake conference back when I was a teenager. I remember him saying that if you were a good member of the Church you wouldn’t
have garage sales. I distinctly remember thinking that that was a strange and wrong thing to say. There isn’t anything wrong with garage sales! But since then I have come to understand what he was trying to teach. Most things that are sold in garage sales are things that you don’t need. If they are indeed
surplus things that you really don’t need anymore, wouldn’t it be more in the spirit of the second great commandment,
Love thy neighbor as thyself, to find people who need those things and give them away? Of course there are exceptions and reasons why sometimes you may need to sell some things to replace them later, but for the most part we really don’t need to have garage sales. Mom and I felt that way when we left Hawaii and received huge expressions of love and gratitude from those that we shared with there. The main concept of Zion hangs on living the two great commandments, as Elder Stevenson shared in conference. The gospel really is quite simple when you think of it…just love God and try to be like Him and love your neighbor and treat them like He would. Simple.
We then went into the library and got to work, after a meeting or two. In the afternoon, right before we needed to leave to go to the temple, I was asked to go up to the main floor and help a guest. What country did they need help with? Yup…Norway. The trend continues. They were looking for a birth record of the man’s namesake, Carl Carlsen. He actually showed up on a marriage certificate in the U.S. as Carl Emil Carlsen. We did some searching and learned that his man, his grandfather, was a sailor who immigrated to the U.S. when he was 29, and was actually born with the name Karl Gustav Karlsen. Where the Emil came from we do not know. It was fun to see them get excited about that find and also for them to move forward with adding his parents to their tree and learning more about the area that he was born in. We then headed to the Jordan River Temple for an endowment session with our three single sister missionaries. After the session we found this new burger joint,
JCW’s The Burger Boys. They were great burgers and super thick milkshakes, which were actually more like a Blizzard. Yum! After getting home I decided I needed to finish the book on Zion before going to our meeting the next day. So I stayed up until after midnight to do that. Yawn.
Friday our meeting started at 9am, with bagels and chocolate milk and yogurt and fruit at 8:30. We met in the Relief Society room of the Social Hall building. It is on the third floor of this building and has glass walls at the back with a great view of downtown Salt Lake City. We had some presentations about our mission goals and some discussion about upcoming events and then went over to the COB lobby area for lunch. After lunch we met the director of the grounds staff for Temple Square and his predecessor who just
retired after 40 years. It was great to hear about all of the flowers and trees and pathways and reflection pond and, and, and…He told us that they put in between 150,000-200,000 tulip bulbs every fall to have them blossom in spring. Wow! When our meeting was finished we walked home and saw even more flowers, so we had to get a picture. Lots of flowers blooming everywhere. I asked if they allow missionaries to serve on temple square to help plant flowers and they said yes. Our mission president immediately said that we were not allowed to transfer! Bummer.
Saturday we got up and it was nice outside. Mom went for a walk and I decided to get in a quick bike ride. I rode twenty miles and Mom did her City Creek Canyon walk and got this picture of one of her friends she sees just about every day. I am excited for warmer weather and plan to ride T-Th-Sa every week. I am thinking that I want to ride across the U.S. next year. Maybe in May and June. I am hoping Scott will be able to come with me, but we shall see if he is in a position to do that or not. After our morning exercise we went into the library. It was pretty quiet most of the day until about 4:30 when it seemed like we suddenly got an influx of people. Luckily my Norway guest had come in earlier so I didn’t get called out to help right before closing this time, but we were definitely busy for about an hour with limited resources to help. Mom had to go downstairs to be an usher the last hour, even though she was supposed to be the floor leader, but we have learned that everyone is so willing to be flexible that we can usually handle anything that happens. Fun times!
Today we had church. We walked up to our building in the wonderful weather and I actually got a little bit warm, and I was just wearing my suit coat. Sacrament meeting was great with many wonderful testimonies and Mom’s primary lesson went well. I am now finishing this blog post and will get ready to haul tables and chairs down to the lobby for our
Break the Fast dinner with the missionaries here in the apartment. We have added a few more couples since last month and I think they said we now have the potential of 54 people attending our gathering. We shall see how many come.
Well, we were a little smaller this month. I think because it was a second Sunday that we had some folks gone to other things or didn’t remember, but we still had about 36 people there. The food was good and there was plenty of it. Mission accomplished. Now it is time to rest and let the food digest and watch an episode of Relative Race.
Hope you had a great week.
Love you all.
BE GOOD!
Sister and Elder Phillips
Comments
Post a Comment