Workshops for April

            It is amazing to me how fast this month is passing by.  Yes, time always seems to go by rapidly, but now it is accelerating!  I’m not sure if it is because we are getting older, or because we seem to find more we need to do each week.

            But, enough philosophy, I want to describe our activities of last week.  On Tuesday we had the wonderful opportunity to pick up our new senior couple from the airport.  We are so grateful for their willingness to serve and to come here to Chile.  They have definitely hit the ground running since they have been working hard helping us with the zone conferences we did last week.

            In our three month cycle of interviews, zone conferences and specialized training, we are in the third phase.  For the first time we decided to have a day of workshop rotations in each zone.  President is teaching the missionaries how to improve in the area of inviting investigators to be baptized.  The assistants are teaching about better planning—very important subject in missionary life. 

Each area in the mission has an “area book” where missionaries record contacts and investigators with addresses, etc.  They are supposed to update it each night, but that doesn’t always happen so the zone leaders are teaching how to keep the book updated and useful.  I am teaching a short class on the basics of leading music, since missionaries are often asked to lead in various meetings, even if they know nothing of the subject.  Also a senior elder is teaching the concept of speaking better Spanish and/or English since each missionary should be learning one or the other.

Before lunch, our nurse is weighing everyone’s weight so we have a baseline in case of illness.  Our new senior couple, along with the other couples has the lunch all ready when we are done with classes, and we really appreciate this service.  This time we are serving ham and cheese sandwiches, chips, soda and a white brownie.  It is simple but they seem to be enjoying it.  After lunch, the assistants are supervising an activity: charades from the scriptures, with each zone divided into two groups.  We have been amazed and entertained by their creativity using only missionaries and zero props.

So that was our week.  We did three conferences last week, we have three this week and two the following one.  By that time I will have taught my class 33 times—sure hope I have it down by the end.  See you next week.

Always a great day when a new senior couple arrives

charades from the scriptures--can you guess?

another charade--they had a great time