Mission Report #3 (Mid-September, 2011)

It is so interesting how small this world is. My trainer in the training zone, Elder Lewis is my cousin two different ways. Also one of the employees in our zone is an acquaintance of our daughter Aimee. That brings up an interesting thing. As missionaries we must call each other Elder and Sister. No biggie there, but the employees we work with we call by their first names. So the boss over our whole department Tom Carter isn’t Brother Carter – just Tom. My other bosses are Kylene, Kristi, and Marissa – and don’t you dare call them Sister – since that is reserved for missionaries. That is just a strange little quirk.
There are many little luxuries we enjoy in this mission that you don’t usually have in a normal mission. Because of the size of the mission – over 400 full-time senior missionaries and twice as many Church Service Missionaries (part time missionaries), and almost 100 young missionaries, we have our own medical office staffed by a missionary nurse and a different doctor each day – GP, cardiologist, dermatologist, orthopedist, and someone else. You can go to them and they will treat you and even prescribe medicine for routine things. If they treat you there isn’t a need to pay. You only have to use your insurance if they refer you out to a specialist.
We spent half of this two weeks in the training zone. My goal was to learn to make sources in PAF and in Roots Magic as I have never done that - I have always used notes. This is one of my goals while here - to source my genealogy properly.