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