Turkey, Lights, Family, and Friends

This has been a much more relaxing and fun week. We had one event last Sunday, The Caribbean Educational Devotional - BYU Pathway. And we have the second half this Sunday, Love, Share and Invite by the Caribbean Area. Other than that we didn't have any other events this week. Oh, there were some language coaching events, but even those were just a few. Lots of people off for the holiday.

The Linfords are doing well on their own now. They started learning some of Steve's responsibilities and are taking over some of those from him. I'm still answering questions, but they are doing really great. It has given me time to rewrite the procedural manuals since we have changed the way we do things from what our trainers taught us. Steve's manual went from over 70 pages down to less than 20. I think my manual will have similar reductions.

On Monday we had a wonderful, and even somewhat emotional, Family Home Evening as each of us shared thoughts about someone we were thankful for and how they impacted our lives. We couldn't be related to the person so I talked about the wonderful example of Sassie O'Sullivan and how she is such a missionary at all times and how she is so giving to everyone. I mentioned that she even gave thanks for her illnesses when she is in the hospital because she can give out more copies of the Book of Mormon. Others shared very tender and emotional stories of people who changed their lives.

On Tuesday all our missionaries were in the office. Sister Petty works from home 3 days a week and comes in on Tuesdays and Fridays. The cafeteria was having their annual Thanksgiving Lunch with all the trimmings so we all went down together to enjoy lunch together. It was so fun. Baptiste was planning on being there, too, because he loves the annual Thanksgiving Lunch; but, he had his COVID booster shot the day before and wasn't feeling very well. We missed him.

On Wednesday the Linfords left a little early to attend a funeral of their niece's husband who just died of COVID. Aaron came in for an event in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. He joined us in the COB for the afternoon, so we enjoyed visiting with him for a few hours. We spent the day finishing up projects and making sure we were up to date on everything. I got a big portion of my procedural manual done. We were able to go home a little early. That was nice.

Thursday was Thanksgiving. I worked on the procedural manual a little in the morning before we headed to Katie Lofts house for Thanksgiving dinner with her family. They had 47 people there which included family and friends. Jeff and Cali Gibbs were visiting so it was fun to see them again. The whole Call family was there, too. About 1/2 hour before we needed to leave, they began showing old home movies. It was really fun because our family was in several of them. All our kids were at Brian's wedding so they were all in the video. We left at 5 so we could be home in time to jump on a Zoom call with Douhet's family so we could talk to Alyson. 

It was so fun to talk to her as well as the rest of the family. We even got to visit with Kirstin, Jayne, Susie, and Jeff too. We've been gone almost 6 months and I can't believe how big the kids have grown. Griffyn surprised me the most. We miss family so much, be we know were are supposed to be here at this time in our life. We are so grateful they our family supports us in this decision.

We started our "White" Friday in the Jordan River Temple doing sealings. I didn't get all our names done so we will try and schedule a few more appointments to complete our names. I found it is easier to schedule last minute appointments because of cancellations. Trying to schedule far in the future doesn't work because we never know when we will have an event; but, last minutes works great. We have done an Endowment and the Sealings just in the last two weeks. It is awesome.

We tried to connect with Sister Brynn Castleton-Rudolph who is serving in Orem, but unfortunately that didn't work. Maybe one of these days we will just go to Orem and drive around in hopes of seeing her. That would be fun!

Later that afternoon we found out that Laila and Tyus were in Utah so we were able to connect for an hour or so and visit with them. We enjoyed that so very much. It was so nice to get a hug from family!!!!

Just about the time they had to go we needed to pick up the Linfords. We all went out to dinner and then went to the Luminaria show at Thanksgiving Point. It is spectacular and so beautiful. We all really enjoyed it. We had a mix up getting the tickets, but eventually we got it all worked out and they let us in even though the gal on the phone put us down for Saturday instead of Friday. It was worth the hassle.

Saturday was pretty laid back. I did some more work on the procedural manual before we went out to do some shopping and get our COVID booster shot. Walmart advertised having all three booster shots available at every store. NOT! The first one we went to only had Pfizer and we needed Moderna. So we went to a different store and got right in. So far no side effects!!! It is fun driving to new places.

Next week our events start picking up again; however, they are all either Zoom, in different buildings, or language coaching so we don't have any events to attend until next Sunday's Christmas Devotional. We will actually do two events for that. We do the live one on December 5 and then we do an additional 9 languages for post recordings on December 7th. 

I hope you all were able to watch Luz de las Naciones last week. That event was recorded completely in Spanish. Our Spanish team then interpreted it into English so we could understand it.  Lluvia Campbell was the female voice. She is a good friend now. And Alejandro (Alex) Melecio was the male voice. He was also the solo singer and lead dancer in the opening scenes. Side note, his whole family performed in that number. If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it on You Tube. You won't regret it. 

We just got to shake hands with President Ballard as we arrived at Church  a little early.  His ward meets right before ours.  We attend his ward sometimes when we have an event in the middle of our meeting, but this is the first time we got close enough to exchange greetings.  

 

I hope you can all watch the Christmas Concert tonight. It is sure to be awesome.

Enjoy this Holiday Season,

Mom and Dad,

Grandma and Grandpa,

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox

The End of the North Temple Visitors Center

This last week was a little sad as we have watched the demolishing of the North Temple Visitors Center. The Christus has been put in storage and the walls have come tumbling down. It has been bitter sweet to watch some of the "construction" that has been going on. We know it will eventually be even more beautiful that it was before; but, it is sad to see so much being torn down. 

Work continues to progress on the Temple. It doesn't look much different from the outside, although we see lots of heavy equipment running all the time. Steve looks out the window everyday with his binoculars. He has a diagram over his desk with a rendering of the finished International Plaza and he compares what he sees to the picture. 

The weather has turned cold but so far no snow. It is mostly clear so it has been absolutely beautiful. With some of the hours we have been working we have been able to see some of the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets I have ever seen. Several times we have seen both in the same day. Below is a picture we took that past week just at dusk. The picture doesn't do it justice. The rays of coming down from the sun were incredible and looked very celestial. It was breath taking.

This past week was the last busy week for a little while at least. We had events Tuesday during the day and then again in the evening. During the day we had our French team participate in the French Polynesia Trainings and Devotionals.  This is a three day event with two sessions each day. On Tuesday we had the Young Adult Devotional and the Youth Devotional. Unfortunately, we didn't get the English piped into our room so we didn't understand much except for an occasional English speaker. 

The event that night was fun and not so fun. It was the Christmas on Temple Square - Opening Concert. I was really looking forward to it for several reasons. First of all it is a concert and those are always fun and second we got to have children come in as they were doing some interpreting! Now for the not so fun part. First of all they put the children on the 28th floor so we didn't get to see much of them at all and they didn't pipe anything in to us so we didn't even get to hear them. We did get a picture of one of the daughters of our Interpreters.

On Wednesday we had the second day of French Polynesia Trainings and Devotional. This time we did the Priesthood Leadership and the General Leadership meetings in the afternoon. In the evening we did the third session of the Asia Area Tour. This was the Missionary Meeting with Elder Uchtdorf. It has been fun to watch Elder Uchtdorf. It is clear that he is not using a script as his talk seems to be purely off the cuff. He shares personal stories that relate to what previous speakers talked about as well as to demonstrate a point he would like to make. He has shared stories bout his kids, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren. For example in one week they attended the blessing of their youngest great grandchild and then the baptism of their oldest great grandchild. He was talking about how important family is and how we need to support them.

Steve's New Ties for his Birthday 

Thursday was Steve's birthday. We had a lighter day than usual. We finished up the third day of the French Polynesia Trainings and Devotional with a Tahiti Member Devotional followed by the final session that was a Tahiti Mission Meeting. Again, most of it was in French so we didn't get a whole lot out of either meeting. We didn't have any evening events so we actually got to leave at 5:30, when the event was over. So to celebrate we went out to Dairy Queen for blizzards. We had a big lunch and weren't very hungry so blizzards served as a delicious dinner and desert. lol

Friday was a very light day. There were two events for the day but both were Language Coaching and didn't require our attendance at all. The Linfords are doing very well and we are just about ready to cut them loose.  We had a meeting with the four of us to go over all the different things Steve and I have been doing to see how we could divide up the tasks. We actually ended up combining a couple of tasks that were almost duplicates between both of our lists. We both were tracking much of the same information about events in two different spreadsheets. We decided it would be more efficient for one person to update both spreadsheets at the same time since some of the information is the same. That way they can copy once and paste twice. We have three big monitors so it is easy to have everything they need open on each screen to make it very easy to update.

Christmas Tree in the JSMB

Saturday was our final event for the Asia Area Tour. This one started at 3:00 AM again. The event didn't start until 5 but we have to be there early to setup and the interpreters come 1 1/2 hours before to do mic checks. Sometimes there are issues and they want to make sure those are all worked out BEFORE the event starts. Because of the early hour, we decided to do breakfast after the event like we did last week. It worked out very well and it is fun to visit with the interpreters when they are a bit more relaxed. They talked a lot about the event and how they had to interpret different things. Sometimes things don't always relate the same in a different language or culture. They would share how they were try and find an analogy that would fit in the language they were interpreting. Some were kind of funny. We were done by about 7:30 and went home and back to bed! 

When we woke up again my brain thought it was the next day, hahaha.  Then I realized it was still Saturday. Steve went shopping. We had another event on Sunday and we were trying to find something we could buy on Saturday to feed them on Sunday. We really don't like having to buy food on Sundays. It worked out pretty good. He bought a big tray of wrap sandwiches. He also got a couple of mixed fruit bowls, cookies, juices, and we had chips in our snack room. It all turned out good. I stayed home and did some work for HawkSoft. I also updated our Zone SharePoint site that I maintain. And finally, I made some real progress on my spreadsheets for Interpreter comparisons between our three systems. I am almost ready to send out emails to each of the team leads for all the languages with a list of their people and their statuses in the systems so we can get a GOOD start on onboarding all the ones that are either Inactive or missing BEFORE next General Conference. I'm hoping to send out the emails before Christmas.

On Sunday we had the first of 2 events for the Caribbean Area. This one was an Education Devotional about BYU Pathway. It was really nice. They even had some songs that were beautiful, both in the music and in the atmosphere. It was at 1:00 so we went to a different ward this morning since it was at the exact time of our normal meeting. We finished a little early so we got to have a nice evening together.

Next week is VERY LIGHT. We don't have another meal event until next Sunday afternoon. It is the 2nd of the Caribbean events. Then on December 5th we have the Christmas Devotional and a few Seminary and Institute events later in December. We might get a few more for December but it is usually pretty light. We have nearly passed 800 events for the year. That is more than any other year they have ever had. We passed last years number which had been the highest a month or two ago and we were just watching to see when we would hit 800. It has been a crazy nearly six months and we have loved every minute of it. We are excited to have the Linfords with us for the next two years. We there there are bigger and better things to come our way.

We hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. We will be spending it with the Lofts/Call family. We are also planning to visit Thanksgiving point again the day after Thanksgiving with the Linfords. They just opened a new exhibit called Luminaria. It will be beautiful.

I can't close without expressing a few of the things we are Thankful for this Holiday Season. First and foremost is our WONDERFUL family. We love them so very much. We miss them but we know this is where we are supposed to be at this time in our life. We know that they support us in this mission and that makes it so much easier to serve. We are grateful for all of you. For your love and friendship and support. Each one of you hold a very special place in our heart. We know we are eternal brothers and sisters and we love that. We are grateful for this incredible mission we are called to serve. I never imagined anything like this and I can't imagine doing anything else. We love it and we know we were called here at this time to do what we have been trained up to do our whole life. And above all, we are Thankful for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. For His Atoning sacrifice for us and for the gifts and blessings that come from Him and our beloved Heavenly Father. They give us peace and comfort in troubled times. They give us the strength and energy we need to fulfill this incredibly busy mission. I sometimes can't believe what we can do here. They give us inspiration and insight to do all the things we need to do. We are so very blessed. May the Lord bless you with all that you stand in need of and with the righteous desires of your heart!

Our Love and Prayers Always,

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox

 3:00 AM, 12 + Hour Days, Training, and More

The week started with Sierra's birthday on Monday (I know how old you are!) followed by the Marine Corps Birthday on the 10th, and Veterans Day on the 11th.  I think November is my favorite month.  These birthdays, and Thanksgiving and the onset of snow at the end of the month.   

Right now its 4:30 AM and we've been in the Church Office Building for an hour and a half in preparation of an Asia  Area Special Youth Devotional that they will be watching live at 5 PM their time.  We're sending out Burmese, Tamil and Vietnamese from here and eight other languages will be interpreted locally within other Asian countries. We get to repeat this again next Saturday morning! (These two paragraphs were from Steve.)

The Linford's jumped right into our very busy lives. They started on Friday and attended an event that night. They came back on Saturday for most of the day with three events. We didn't have any events on Sunday. Monday was spent in training all day. They are doing great. Monday night we all attended our Branch Aloha Potluck Dinner. It used to be a monthly social, but with COVID it has not been occurring. We did have one in June when we got here, but then they stopped again. We are hoping they will start up monthly again. They already have December scheduled. It was a lot of fun with good food and fellowship. It is a time we Welcome our new missionaries and say good bye to the ones who are leaving. Aloha means both Hello and Good bye.

This was our week:

Tuesday and Wednesday started at 6:00 AM. Tuesday ended at 7:00 PM  Wednesday ended at 8:00 PM. Thursday started at our "regular" time of 8:00 with a Zone Devotional and ended at 9:30 PM  Friday we didn't have any events so we went to the Temple in the morning. We thought we would just work a couple of hours and go home by 2. Not so. We didn't get out until after 5:00. Saturday started at 6:00 AM and ended at 4:30. And then, of course, we started Sunday at 3:00 AM. It ended at 6:30 however we had our breakfast after the event and didn't get out until around 7:30. Needless to say we came home and took a nap before Church.

During the week we covered such events as: 

• Temple Recorders Seminar - This event lasted for three days. Unfortunately for us a box on our video equipment was broke so we missed the first two days before we got it fixed. We got to enjoy the third day (Thursday), which I think was the best. The other two days were a lot of trainings and such. They had breakout rooms. We managed to get a zoom link to watch one of the breakout rooms. The third day was filled with Spiritually uplifting stories of the many little miracles that happen in the Temples all round the world. So many really touched my heart.

This is Eunlan, one of our Supervisors

• General Officers Training - There were several different events in several different areas. Some were strictly on Zoom and done from the comfort of the Interpreter's home. If we had 2 or more areas happening at the same time we brought them into the Church Office Building (COB) to make it easier on the engineer to manage all the things he needs to do. In those cases we fed them. We almost missed Wednesday night where we had three different areas. Baptiste came to the COB earlier in the day. We wondered why he was there. We already had a 6 AM breakfast meeting for the Temple Recorders event and we had several events back to back for the Central America Area Review. When I asked him why he was there he said he was there for his General Officer Training events. Apparently we had thought they were all going to be from their homes and thought we were going home at 5:00 that night. N
  ot True.  Not only did we have to add his three events (total people 7) to our 5:00 dinner (the catering staff are so awesome. They added it without blinking.) but we realized we HAD a 5:00 dinner that night. We are all so tired from the massive amount of events so we thought we were going to go home early.  HAHAHAHAHA. Anyway, thanks to our AMAZING catering staff they saved us and we had a very good evening. I turned out to be our longest day - 6AM to 9:45PM.
  

• I already mentioned the Central America Area Review events. This one covered two weeks and ten sessions. We completed the last three on Saturday morning until 2 PM. Whew!

• Luz de las Naciones - This in an AMAZING event you don't want to miss. It is an Annual Spanish event that means Light of the Nations. It is filled with wonderful music and interviews. It will be broadcast on November 20th. You can find it on the Church website. The brother soloist in the beginning of the broadcast is one of our Interpreters. He performs for a living and is incredible. His whole family performs and a few months ago they (the family) did a song for one of the Apostles in an event we did. It is so fun to watch him. I hope you can all watch it. Don't worry, you will be able to hear it in English.  Our AMAZING Interpreters will be interpreting from Spanish to English.

• Saturday afternoon AFTER all the Central America events we held a Screening for New Interpreters. We had about thirty perspective interpreters come. We gave them snacks, a short introduction to who we are (Baptiste gave the intro, not us. lol) and then they went into the booths for about an hour to test their skills in several different things such as; speaking English if they ever have to go from their language to English, reading text in their language (not acting, but not boring either), interpreting with no script (we call this simultaneous interpretation), and reading from a script while listening to the speaker at the same time and then have the speaker go off
  
  script and have them interpret the off script remarks and then go back on script. Tricky!  That is way they are all so amazing. The interpreters doing the screening tried to make it fun for them to help ease their nervousness.  All in all it went very well and they all seemed to have fun. I think we are going to be onboarding several new talents for our teams.

• 
  And the Asia Area Tour with Elder Uchtdorf - This is a series for 4 events from Saturday to Saturday. The first event was on Saturday the 13th. It was all done "IN COUNTRY" meaning it all took place in Asia. The next three events we will have at least 2 or 3 languages interpreting from the COB. Sunday morning we arrived at 3:00 AM to setup for the event that started at 5. We are twelve hours different so the live event was at 5:00 PM in Asia. Despite the early hour it was a very good event. I spent most of the time training the Linfords on one of the programs they just got aut
  hority to, so I missed much of the event. I did hear most of Elder Uchtdorf's closing remarks. Because it started so early we decided to serve breakfast AFTER the event. It turned out to be a good decision. Several Interpreters stayed and ate with us which is always fun.

During the day for several days this past week, I was on the phone with our Technical Support so we could get some programs installed and phone's updated and emails fixed and several other things that needed to be done. We accomplished quite a bit of housekeeping. I think the Linfords are pretty well setup. We are still waiting on a few more approvals for some software they need access to, but other than that they are all are set.

We have one more fairly busy week this coming week before a nice break for Thanksgiving. The fun one I am really looking forward to is the Christmas Concert on December 16th. We have several children coming in to do interpretations for Spanish, Portuguese, and French. We will record those. And then at 7 we have dinner and the adults portion of the concert will be recorded.

After Thanksgiving we will start dividing up the events between the Linford's and us so that none of us should have to work the long days or so many days in a row again. It will be HEAVEN!

Have a great week and know that we LOVE you!!!

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox

Lots of EVENTS!!! AND New Missionaries!!! 

Our little reprieve is over...at least until the middle of December. We went from 13 events on the schedule to 43 in a matter of a couple of days. Thankfully most of them are Language Coaching events; however, we do have meal events nearly everyday until November 20th. We have an occasional day off here and there, but then we make up for that by having multiple events on the same day. Here is our schedule since November third (NOTE this isn't including any of the offsite events):

This is our schedule for the next two weeks.
Each color represents an Event and each line 
of the same color represents a session in that 
event. The Yellow is the Central America 
Area Review Event. It has 10 sessions.

• Nov 3 - Mexico Missions with Elder Holland - Breakfast
• Nov 4 - General Officers Multiple Trainings - NAC Idaho - Dinner
• Nov 5 - Central America Area Review - Virtual Dinner - Dinner
• Nov 6 - Central America Area Review - Missionary Meeting - Breakfast Snacks
• Nov 6 - Central America Area Review - Retalhuleu 1 - Lunch
• Nov 6 - Central America Area Review - Retalhuleu 2 - Snacks

That was last week. This is what is coming THIS week:

• Nov 9 - Temple Recorders Seminary - 6 AM Breakfast
• Nov 9 - Central America Area Review - Area Review - Lunch
• Nov 10
  - Temple Recorders Seminary - 6 AM Breakfast
• Nov 10 - Luz de las Naciones (Prerecording) - Dinner (when this is released on Nov 20 you will want to watch it. The first solo singer in the video is one of our Interpreters. He is AWESOME.)
• Nov 11 - Temple Recorders Seminary - Lunch
• Nov 11 - Central America Area Review - Area Council/Mission Leadership - Lunch
• Nov 11 - Central America Area Review - Area Devotional - Dinner
• Nov 13 - Central America Area Review - San Salvador East PLC - Breakfast 
• Nov 13 - Central America Area Review - San Salvador East CLC - Snacks
• Nov 13 - Central America Area Review - Missionary Meeting (9 missions) - Lunch
• Nov 13 - Screening New Interpreters - Snacks
• Nov 14 - Asia Area Tour - Expanded Area Council Meeting with Elder Uchtdorf - 3:30 AM Breakfast after event at 6:30 AM

I'll stop there, but the week after that is also completely filled. Fun Times!!!

The view from the window at one of our Events.

On Thursday Morning President Parker (one of the counselors in our Mission Presidency) came to see us. The new missionaries had just finished their training and they were in the process of assigning them to their respective "missions". They have been ever mindful of us and felt they had a few potentials. They didn't want to risk another incorrect assignment like the last one. So, President Parker presented us with 4 potential couples that they felt might work in our department. We reviewed each couple and he was very good about pointing out their strengths and potential red flags that were discovered in training. For example one couple sounded great when listing the strengths. The Elder had great computer skills and the Sister had good office skills and was fair with computers. The red flags were the Elder tended to take over the world. Apparently he caused some stress in the trainings. The Sister uses a cane to get around and they were concerned if she could keep up with all the physical stuff we do. 

President Parker went over each couple and all probably would be able to work in our department; however, we wanted to find the best fit possible. Two of the couples were well suited to this mission; however, President Parker was hoping we wouldn't choose them because they felt that some of their strengths would be better utilized in two different departments. We were fine with that. The third couple we looked at we felt strongly about the whole time. They both have basic computer skills and will be capable of doing what we both do. Above all they have desire! They said they were here to work hard and didn't mind working evenings and weekends. This is their third mission so they know what they are getting into. They like being behind the scenes but also don't mind meeting people. They were the ones President Parker and President Randall were also leaning towards so we felt good that the Spirit confirmed the same couple to all of us.

Elder and Sister Linford 
Our New Missionaries

On Friday morning we attending the meeting where the missionaries received their assignments. When they announced Elder and Sister Linford they told them they would be serving "on top of the world" and that it was more literal then they realized. We were introduced along with Elder and Sister Drasso, our Zone Leaders. We attended a little reception after the sorting hat where we could visit and have some refreshments. Then we took them to the Church Office Building and gave them a tour. We told them we had an event that evening and we would even feed them if they wanted to jump right in. They said they would love to but needed to pick up something at the store first. They came back and we started with an overview of what we both do so they could decide who wanted to do what. They surprised me by saying they both wanted to learn what both of us do so they will both know all the ins and outs. They are anxious to serve and eager to learn. We hit it off immediately and I know we will become fast friends. They will be here for 2 years so that will be AWESOME. We have our full team now. 

I have mentioned our invoicing software before and some of the problems we have. I have been bugging the people who can change and fix things with all the things I would like changed and fixed. Tim Richards is one of the brothers I talk to a lot. He is very nice and always willing to help me. For sometime now he has said that he wanted to get me more authority to be able to do some of my own changes. He feels I know enough about computers and such that I could handle it. (I think it is because I have asked questions no one has ever thought of before. ;-)) So a few weeks ago they put me on a Plunet Governance Group where we meet every two weeks, soon to move to every week, and talk about Plunet issues. We will also probably be the group that is looking into replacing Plunet. Again, they can't seem to answer some of my questions and several others on the

group said I should get more power. So, one of the leaders in the group put in a request for me to get "Phenomenal Cosmic Power, itty-bitty living space." It has been awesome. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday evening creating a new Master Template in PLUNET that contains ALL our languages and the coordinators associated with each language. Then I can use a Request feature to create a new order and specify what languages are on the order and say to use my ALL Languages template as the base and it will bring in just those languages with the coordinators already listed in the order, along with a lot of others things that are set in the template. It makes making orders much, much faster. There are lots of other things I want to explore and now that we have new missionaries to help with the everyday load I will have time to explore and research and continue to improve processes. If you can't tell, I am very excited!!!

We hope you have a FANTASTIC week! Oh, and Happy Birthday to Sierra!!!

Love All of You!!!

Elder and Sister Wilcox

Steve and Leslee

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa