We get to do a lot of stuff

Because we are the only missionaries and only church leadership here we get to do a lot of tasks that are usually assigned to people that have skills and experience in those areas. Sometimes we laugh to ourselves that there are people that think we are competent in these things.

We are the public and governmental relations experts. This is a picture of the area president, Elder Evans. He is meeting with one of the leaders of a local trade school and Catholic Church here. A major task, that is going surprisingly well, is our efforts to meet with top government officials. We have been able to obtain an invitation to meet with the prime minister of the country. Because a meeting like this is so significant the area presidency wants to be involved. So, we are trying to coordinate all of this.

We are also the countries Electronic media specialist. Mostly that means that we run and maintain the church's country Facebook page. I've never had a Facebook page before so this has been difficult.

We are also in charge of maintaining the building. The church has a rented building here. It was probably constructed in the 1950s. It's in pretty good condition for this country but still has lots of maintenance issues. This is a picture of the water pump that we have to plug in each week. One of the underground pipes broke and it took us about 3 months to get it fixed. Now the water tank on top of the roof is leaking. Currently we have one of the air conditioning units that keeps malfunctioning.

We are of course in charge of cleaning the building. We have a paid cleaning crew that comes in twice a month. Because the building is so heavily used with our English classes it gets pretty dirty. Also the fact that there's lots of air leaks and gaps we get lots of bugs and lizards inside of the building. We always see a few geckos inside.

We are in charge of the Sunday services. We used to feel guilty that our services only lasted for 2 hours until the church changed and followed our example. Our Sacrament meetings are always interesting because we have so few members. We usually only have one speaker and then a conference talk. Because there are so few available speakers everyone has to talk. Even all of the adult investigators have given talks.

Cheryl teaches our single primary class. Two of the three students only speak Tetun and can't understand what she says. Somehow she keeps them involved for the 45-minute class time.

I am in charge of the meetings but don't have an official calling to do so. I have been appointed by the mission president to hold a sacrament meeting but I have no ecclesiastical Authority. All interviews have to be done by the mission president when he comes about once a quarter.

We are currently holding our Sunday services in three languages. English, Bahasa and Tetun. This week our investigator who translates from English to Tetun did not come so our fast and testimony meeting was not understood by all. We don't really know how the meetings are going to go until we see who shows up and then we improvise.

English classes are interesting. We have a set of PowerPoint lessons from BYU that are great. They have to be modified a lot to fit the country. 95% of the students have never been out of the country or on an airplane. None of them have ever been on a vacation or have a bank account. 90% of them don't drive. Most have never been to a movie theater. None of them have ever been to an amusement park or gone bowling. 90% of these young adults have never had a job before.

We are expected to find Partners to work on humanitarian projects with. These three men presented a project to us that we ultimately had to reject because the project was so remote we would probably never be able to check on its progress. What was challenging was that only the man in the middle was able to speak any kind of English. We probably only understood at best one half of what he was saying. There seems to be so many good projects and so many people that want our money to complete them that we have to be very selective so as to spend our money wisely.

So we just plod on. We try to do our best not to do anything stupid. We are grateful that the Lord directs this work and compensates for our inabilities. We've gotten used to all this. As you can see in this video even leading our English class in a song is not so hard anymore.