Sunday, January 19, 2014


The Week in Review

After accomplishing all of the needful work on our P-day, the Sisters headed for King of Prussia Mall and Wegman's.  This is a very large market filled with wonderful food, health food and regular food.  As it was explained to me it is a chain on the east coast.  If you lived near this store you could just shop daily and choose things already prepared or almost prepared.  We were told by a mission trainer out of SLC that we just had to see this store.  

We got to do some pretty unique and interesting things this week.  We got word this week that 3 of our visa waiters had received their visas and would be flying out tomorrow.  One had to ship some things home, so his mom sent us a debit card and we had to take it to him.  So we went right down to South Philly and met him at the church, which was in a beautiful office building with an attractive glass front.  Then, since we were so close, we headed to "Tony Lukes" a legend in Philadelphia.  His specialty is roast pork sandwiches, but he has all sorts of hot sandwiches.  We had the roast pork and mine had broccoli-rabe on it.  Delicious.  It is located right under a train route so it is quite noisy.  That night the local hockey team was playing, so there were many people getting a sandwich before the game.  The stadium was just a couple of blocks away.

We have been given the assignment to inspect apartments within our area of the mission.  So this month we had been assigned 2 apartments out near Valley Forge.  We traveled out to them and were very pleasantly surprised to find the older apartment (with 2 elders who we were told were pack-rats) spic and span clean while the next apartment, in a newer location (housing elders we were told had the cleanest apt. ever) was very dirty.  We will be given about 2 apartments per month to inspect.  We got to visit a new part of town and that was interesting, plus we stopped at the famous Zwalen's Ice Cream--local frozen custard eatery owned by members and gives the missionaries 50% discount.  We did enjoy our afternoon.

Elder Jones worked all day yesterday.  We have 275 missionaries in our mission.  This week is transfers and a total of 76 companionships will be affected.  That meant that on Saturday Elder Jones had to organize the service elders to go to the parts of the mission where only public transportation is available and pick up their luggage and bring it to the mission office.  I do not think he slept well Friday worrying about it.  Anyway, he had developed a complex diagram of the locations and the route and had it all ready.  The suitcases were all retrieved before 5 pm.  After transfers they will do all of this again, only with different bags...

Transfers are quite interesting.  Monday we send the 3 Visa waiters on their way.  That night we honor the 7 departing missionaries who have completed their missions.  Next day:  take the departing missionaries to the airport, pick up the new missionaries (only 4 this time).  They have dinner with us Tuesday, sleep at the mission home and then on Wed. the transfers take place, the Golden's get assigned and those training Golden's receive training.  Elder Jones has to interview each new Golden to determine their eligibility to drive while on their mission.  For me the only complication is getting the phone numbers all correct and applied to the i-phones.  It seems that our mission is going down in numbers.  With the changes mentioned we will be closing down 3 apartments this month.  All of this makes the office busy and life complicated for our president.  We love it, though!

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