Week 96 - Preparation day woes.

Since Elder Marques and I work in the office, we have our p-day on Saturday.  Things like real estate agencies and other businesses are only open Monday through Friday and we have to be here to solve anything that comes up. We also need to answer the phone calls.  Rather than a p-day on Monday with the rest of the mission, ours is on Saturday.

We asked the assistants to try and change their p-day to Saturday so we could do things together but they didn't.  A couple of weeks ago they played basketball with President and Sister Silcox.  Elder Marques and I were allowed to play for ten minutes.  P-day alone just has no point.

With all our appointments on Saturday, we don't have time to go anywhere.  Our p-days are never really p-days anyway.  We are always solving and fixing problems.  Somebody always calls. There are often housing and medical problems that need fixing.

I don't do anything with the housing problems. Elder Marques handles all the housing issues.  I handle the medical issues.  Even if I don't have anything on my plate, if my companion does, I need to stay with him until the problem is solved.

In the states, the missions have senior couples that act as the secretaries. Here most missions don't have senior missionaries.  Plus most missions have four secretaries. In our mission it's just Elder Marques and I.

Sometimes, there is little to be done.  I hate staying in the office when there is nothing to do. I just study scriptures all day.  Sometimes I'm so bored.  It's been hot recently, but I would welcome the opportunity to be out in the streets again finding and teaching people.

Today, we woke up at 5:00 to play soccer with the youth and we hope to get away and play with the adults at 4:00. We will have lunch at a wonderful Chilean member's home today.

The Mission President, the Sister Leaders, and the Assistants are working on transfers right now. Transfers are this coming week.

The zone.

There's tons of mosquitos now.  Is the Zika virus a big problem world wide?

Here in South America dogs are like the squirrels back home. They are all over the place.  There are a lot of strays.