Washington, D.C. South Mission

Dear Family, Sorry this is a little late. I opted for a nap Sunday afternoon instead of writing my letter and it was too late to write after we got back from the fireside. More about that later. Sometimes it is hard to write about the week because they seem to run together. We try to get to the office by 8 and don’t often leave until between 6-7. By the time we get dinner and do a little with WES and read in the Book of Mormon we don’t get much done. Monday the Mission President was in the office in the afternoon and that always makes things a little hectic. Sister Caplin often spends time with Dad to try to get all of the items on the calendar and to let him know what is coming up. We are having a couple of mission tours which are changing up the schedule a bit. We won’t have any zone conferences because of the visits. Elder Bennett is coming to tour the mission and after that Elder B Kenneth Packer is coming. He is President Boyd K. Packer’s grandson and was also the trainer f...

Dear Family, We did not do any sightseeing but did some chores. There are two events that I want to report on. 1. Last Sunday night the stake put on a fireside. The speaker was a non-member professor from the University of Virginia. His expertise is marriage research. The gist of his message was that the stuff you hear in the media and the concepts that are popular in our culture about marriage are just wrong. He showed the results of many studies and scientifically or statistically marriage the way it is taught in the Gospel gives the greatest probability of being a happy marriage and that the children of a traditional marriage have a much higher chance of being happy and avoiding troubles with education, careers, drugs, divorce, etc. The professor’s name by chance is Brad Wilcox, but not the Brad Wilcox from BYU. I guess the Lord knows what he is talking about. 2. Tonight, we went to a New Member and Returning Member Fireside that is put together by the Mission. It wa...

Dear Family, Here it is the end of our third week. We are beginning to get into a routine and I can almost plan a day or even a day or two into the week. We can even drive to church and the office as well as the grocery store without using gps. We, however, can go very far without it. In fact, we have found that most of the time the gps takes us one way to get some place and brings us home a completely different way. How in the world do they expect us to learn to navigate our way around here on our own. On Monday I did the big rent payments for the mission. We have about 74 apartments that are preset and 2 that are still done individually each month. I had to gasp a little when I saw the total for the 74 units totaling $169+ thousand dollars. That didn’t even include the utilities for each of these apartments! Before I pay each of these rents I need to review the leases to make sure that the base payment doesn’t change for the current month (each lease has a different renewal m...

Dear Family, We are still working about 10-hour days, but we now know more of what we are doing. There are still things we don’t know, but those mysteries are much fewer and less frequent than 2 weeks ago. The couple we replaced, Elder and Sister Beus, left September 10, 2018. We arrived October 2, 2018. Before the Beus’ left, the Judson’s came to fill in the breach. They served in the office 5 years ago and kept things going until we came. They have been coming in about 3 times a week to train us and help us out. But we are far enough along that we will now call them only when we are stuck. I am going to run my stuff mostly on the computer. I will still have files but many of them will be on the computer instead of paper files. My calendaring will be done more on the computer. I think in a month or two I will be able to get my current tasks done in 6 hours a day. I will then be able to help out elsewhere or do some creative things. Friday, we got a free Papa John’s pizza. The ...

Dear Family, Here it another week and time to catch you up a little about the east side of our country. Much is the same, but hopefully we are getting smarter and beginning to find our way to the mission office and back home without using our GPS. We even made it to church today—a new destination—without the aid of GPS. We did, however, look at GPS and read through the directions recognizing the names of the streets they named and felt we could make it. We did! Monday was a holiday around here, but not for the mission. We like to get into the office by 8 am thus giving us an hour before the other people in the office arrive. That gives us a little time to get organized and do a little relearning. For some reason the postal service in this part of the country is a little spotty and we have 3-5 apartment leasing companies that don’t get their lease payments each month. Once we are notified they have not received our payment, we have to check with Salt Lake to see if the checks h...

Dear Family, Week 2 in the office: I spent much of the week organizing the work to a way I can understand. I am putting most of the work on the computer and not in paper. I am also scheduling the work in Excel so I can see what needs to be done. By Christmas I hope to have this 95% down. By March I think I will be able to do everything that I know about in 4 to 6 hours per day. Of course, there are things that come up that are not on the schedule, but I don’t think this is a 8 hour a day job. When I get things down, I will have Mom cross train me on her finance stuff. Then I will cross train her on my responsibilities. We can help each other, and the work will be more fun to do together. I non-member called this week. She said that her brother was a member but was in jail because he killed his parents. (For sure is excommunicated.) She asked if her brother could ever be exalted in the celestial kingdom? Is there any reason he should try to repent, if he is never going to...

Dear Family, Missionary Training Center Our time at the MTC seems like a long time ago. In summary we loved it. It was even better than I thought it would be. We were taught by Elder Neil L. Anderson, Elder David A. Bednar and Elder Jeffery R. Holland. The last two were video tapes of informal devotional talks – no notes. It seems before the internet, I heard more informal teaching from the Brethren. There is whole different experience when they speak from the heart. You get a glimpse into what they are really like. The first week we were taught a very few concepts from Preach My Gospel. The major topic was how to invite others to come unto Christ. We were assigned another couple to work with – the Esplin’s from the Logan area. They are office couples in the Mexico Monterey Mission. Elder Esplin is a PhD physicist that knows very little Spanish. Sister Esplin has never worked outside the home and know very, very little about computers. We invited them to seek the gift of tongues – He n...

Dear Family, This is the beginning of our second week. It some ways it seems so short of a time and other times it seems that there has been a lot of stuff packed into this time. I could also get used to not having to cook or do dishes. Monday started out with our training for the office at 8:00. There are only five couples in our classes; one of them is our other couple, one couple is from our district, and the other two are from the big group. We spent the first hour as a devotional. Although it was nice to sing a song, have a spiritual thought and prayer, I was getting antsy to get started with the training. They finally got going and we had some good instruction until noon. We worked on IMOS which is the Church’s software system. We were able to pull up our actual mission information and even saw ourselves as missionaries in the Washington, DC, South Mission but still in the MTC. After getting an overview of the information they had, we needed to learn some things about e...