Travel to Salt Lake City for Humanitarian Training

View of Salt Lake Temple from the Hotel Utah

Grand piano in the lobby of the Joseph Smith building

We arrived at the train station with a busload of missionaries.

We met brother and sister fox in the mission home. They are on their way to a mission in England
Today was our first day of humanitarian training. We took a train from Provo to Salt Lake City. We were then picked up by brother and sister Walton who are the coordinators for senior missionaries. They then dropped us off and Welfare Square. We were meant by Bryant Pankratz who is one of the directors of the services there. He gave us some training and then a tour throughout the facility. We visited Deseret Industries, The Granary the Dary area and the Deseret Industries store.

We didn't travel to the Joseph Smith building which is the converted Hotel Utah. We had a wonderful lunch. Beef Wellington with a delicious chocolate pie dessert. We then heard from Steve Peterson who is the head of welfare services for the church. He gave us an overview. This day as well as all of the previous ones have been remarkable in that Cheryl and I are the only participants. Usually there are several humanitarian missionary couples, but in this class it is just us yet they give us the same treatment with the same amount of guest speakers and attention. It's been a little bit humbling.

We then met with Brother Jeff Foy who is the director of emergency response for the church. He has been especially busy lately with all of the hurricanes, earthquakes and mudslides throughout the world. He explained the churches abilities and response to the source of disasters

On the second day, Tuesday, November 7th we met with Kristi Haycock, who helps direct the wheelchair and immunizations for the church. She gave us a more in-depth overview of the humanitarian Services, its history, principles and purpose.

We then met with Steve Dobb who is more like an operations guy for the Department. He reviewed our humanitarian computerize reporting system and also helped us understand how to qualify and identify welfare projects.

Finally we met with Denya Palmer, who is over social media. She made us aware of the need for us to document and record our experiences for their future use in Media presentations.

On day 3 of our humanitarian training on Wednesday November 8th we first met with Kevin Theriot, one of the heads of LDS Family Services. He explains the services and what might be available in the area we were serving. The second half of his presentation was suggestions that Cheryl and I might implement in our personal relationship and in managing and coping on our mission.

One of the suggestions he gave was for each day that we take 5 minutes each and explain to the other person the emotions we experience throughout the day. We alternate each day on who goes first. The other advice he gave us he has to be comfortable with taking time for ourselves throughout our mission. Never we become too stressed or pushed we should take time away from what we are doing. He suggested that we judge the success of our mission on how our relationship as a couple evolved during our time of service.

We then met with Brett MacDonald who is over member welfare projects for the church. These are projects similar to humanitarian projects only for members of the church. Even though his area doesn't pertain to us too much on our mission because of the few members in our area he gave some excellent advice on how to interview and set expectations for our welfare partners. What are the things he coached us was rather than asking someone what can we do to help we should ask them what types of problems are you trying to solve. This gets away from setting the expectation with the potential partner that we will solve their problems rather than working with them.

After lunch we met with David Berrett from the office of legal counsel. He gave us excellent legal advice on how to not get ourselves or the church into trouble. A couple of interesting things he went over was to impress upon us not to assist with arranging adoptions or immigrations. Also the importance not to help out others financially from our personal funds. All of these things create expectations and liabilities to the church.

Finally we met with sister Walton our humanitarian director. She gave us advice on drinking water safety and gave both show and i a personal water purification bottle.

We had lunch today in the church office building cafeteria. It was a wonderful cafeteria. Lots of selections and the prices were modest. I had filet of sole and Cheryl had he pulled pork sandwich.

Elder Nelson, president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles was the Tuesday night devotional speaker. The items he spoke on that impress me were:

  • Missionaries have Gods laws written on their hearts. Then become true messengers. 
  • Grasp the concept of listening to the spirit. 
  • If only have one convert hope my it will be yourselves. 


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