June 28, 2015
I’ve come to know that there is a lot of special jargon in the missionary area just like in all other aspects of life. The concept of a “transfer” being a six-week period of time is rather foreign to almost everyone who hasn’t been a missionary or has had a missionary in the family. Well, this transfer ended today and a new six-week transfer period starts tomorrow. On Wednesday two sister missionaries finish their eighteen-months of service and return home. One goes back the Mesa, Arizona and the other to Logan, Utah. They’ve both been excellent missionaries and we’ll miss them a lot! I’m sure their families (and particularly their mothers) will be glad to have them back home.
On the Saturday evening after the Visitors’ Center closes on the last Saturday of a transfer all of the Visitors’ Center missionaries gather in the large auditorium for a hilarious event called “Transfer News”. The Coordinating Sisters (these are the two sisters assigned to be in charge of all the sister missionaries at the Center, kind of like a Zone Leader in the normal missionary sense) together with Elder Priday (the Center Director), and President Warner (the Hawaii Honolulu Mission President) work out all of the transfers, companionships, living arrangements, Ward assignments, and leadership assignments. Then on Saturday the Coordinating Sisters make a video showing all of the new assignments. On some transfers there are a lot of companionship changes, others not so much. Last transfer was a major shakeup. This one had fewer dramatic changes. Two sisters are going home, four new sister missionaries are arriving from the MTC in Provo, three sister missionaries are going out to Full Field (full time as proselytizing missionaries for three months) and three sisters are coming back from full field. A few other companionship changes will occur as well. All of these changes take place on Wednesday morning.
This is the third “Transfer News” presentation since we’ve been here. Now that we pretty well know most of the sister missionaries by name and by sight, we were able to follow the presentation quite nicely. They started with all the sister missionary pictures off to the side and all of the apartments (empty) in the center. They picked up each of the sister missionaries one by one and “flew” them around the various possible apartments, finally dropping the picture off at the assigned apartment. Eventually all apartments and companionships were filled in. As each picture “flew” into position, all of the sister missionaries would whoop and hollar, cheer, clap, and make a big deal out of them. It was definitely a lot of fun! Two things remained certain as far as I was concerned:
- I won’t change companions during my mission
- I’ll never be the senior companion.
With the new transfer period starting tomorrow, our shift schedule changes as well. Regardless of the schedule, we always work Sunday morning from 9-11:30am, three other mornings from 9:00 – 2:30pm and two afternoons from 2:30pm until 8:00pm. For the next six weeks we’ll be at the Center on Monday and Tuesday afternoon, have Wednesday as our Preparation Day, and be at the Center on Thursday through Saturday mornings. One thing for sure … we always know where we’ll be during the day every day of the week! That works out very well for me, a person who thrives on regularity (I’m happy eating the same breakfast every day of the year), but your mother likes a Lot More Variety… (eating the same thing for breakfast two days in a row is, well, sinful).
We’ve also come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a “normal” day at the Visitors’ Center. Every day is so different from the day previously as to be incomprehensible. This past week the Lions Club International had their big convention in Honolulu. That meant more than 2,000 members of the Lions Clubs in India along with family members came to Hawaii. Almost en-mass they came to the Polynesian Cultural Center on Friday. Hundreds also came over to the Center. What fun chaos. There is a “Laie Tram Tour” that leaves the PCC every twenty minutes between 3pm and 6:40pm for a 35-minute tram tour. The open-sided tour bus goes through the town, through the BYU-Hawaii campus, and then stops at the Visitors’ Center to drop everyone off. That tram then picks up the people who came on the previous tram back to the PCC. Well, one very full tram pulled up in the middle of the afternoon. It was hot and humid. Sixteen people got off. The rest, all Indians, decided that they weren’t going to get off. Meanwhile, the tram guests waiting to go back to the PCC didn’t have room to get on … also mostly Indians. Quite a loud discussion in some language other than English ensued. The tram driver wouldn’t let them just “hang on” to the side of the tram and wouldn’t move until everyone was seated and no one was “hanging on”. I’m certain that Heather can see the whole thing with clarity and amusement. Eventually the sister missionary convinced the waiting tram guests to wait patiently for ten more minutes and she would return immediately with an empty tram. It all worked out in the end, as it always does.
We’re assigned to the Laie 3rd Ward in the Laie Stake for our church meetings. This assignment is made by the Center Director, Elder Priday in consultation with the Mission President, President Warner. Our membership records, however, stay in our home ward back in Pocatello, meaning that we’re not really “members” of the local Ward or Stake. The Church recently created a new member category called “a member living outside the ward boundaries”. This was originally set up for kids and teenagers who shuttle from one parent to another after a divorce so that they can be “members” of both wards and so they don’t get lost in the shuffle. That turns out to be just the solution for us senior missionaries! As of this Sunday, we are now officially members of the Church in Hawaii and in Pocatello. We’ll see what that means over time. But, it could mean we might be called as Sunday School teachers or something similar that doesn’t require time from us during the week when we’re working at the Center. Even more helpful, it should speed up the process of getting to know the members in the Laie 3rd Ward!
We’re getting fairly acclimatized over here where significant humidity is a constant. I was wondering why we haven’t had any thunderstorms since we got here. Asking around I learned that there was one thunderstorm late last summer but that was the only one. Google revealed that thunderstorms are very rare in Hawaii because there aren’t the land masses to cause uneven heating of the air causing big updrafts and downdrafts. So, a thunderstorm is an unusual event while rainbows are not. We get lots of short (often heavy) rain showers. They are quite localized, almost never broad-based. And, a rainbow is almost always visible afterwards during the morning and evening daylight hours. We’ve seen a number of very pretty double rainbows. They just add to the beauty of the area.
So, another week is in the books. We’re well on our way to the four month mark of our mission. It seems like we’ve been here forever, but at the same time it feels like we’ve just started. The time is flying by very quickly. We think of all of you often and pray for all of you regularly. We love you!
Love,
father!
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