Worldwide Missionary Devotional, Roots Tech 2022, and lots of Meetings

This has been one CRAZY week with last minute changes, lots and lots of food, and plenty of meetings. Poor Elder Linford and Elder Wilcox spent a frustrating week juggling Interpreters for Roots Tech pre-recordings. I found out later that the teams for the different languages were playing a tug of war between SLC and IN COUNTRY on who was going to do which session of Roots Tech. This was the "main event" as they are calling it. It consists of 4 different nearly hour long videos that have been put together kind of like they do the World News Report with short little segments all put together. It started on Friday, Feb 4th where they dubbed all the little videos that were originally done in native languages into English.

These are the languages we did for Roots Tech.
NOTE: Chinese is only for the written word. The
Interpreted languages are Cantonese and Mandarin. 

On the 9th and 10th, we had thirteen different languages interpreted for two 1 hour videos each day. They were divided into two sessions, morning and evening. Generally it was for the countries who are 8 plus hours different than us in the morning and the others in the evening. However, some languages couldn't decide who would do the interpretation, so we were constantly switching back and forth between SLC and IN COUNTRY people. Some ended up with the interpreters being made up with some from each team. On occasion we found out at the event itself that there were different people doing interpreting, than was on the list that morning. CRAZY. I'll come back to the actual events in a little while.

On Monday evening we had a wonderful Mission Devotional with Elder and Sister Kevin Hamilton. He is a General Authority Seventy primarily over Family History. He shared several insights on how Roots Tech is working in this COVID world environment. He said he asked Elder Bednar last year if he thought the Virtual Roots Tech was a good idea and Elder Bednar said something like, "I don't know. If you can tell me we can reach Greenland, then I'll embrace it." Elder Hamilton proceed to tell us how many people participated in the Virtual Roots Tech last year and mentioned they even had two from Greenland sign up. And there isn't even a Family History Center in Greenland!

On Tuesday morning, we gave our Zone Devotional. We chose a talk that Sister Wendy Nelson recently gave in the Europe Area Tour with President Nelson just a week or so ago. One of the things she talked about was Following the Prophet. She ended her remarks by highlighting 5 examples from President Nelson's life. She shared little stories with each example. That is what we based our devotional on. They are:

• He is attentive and alert.
• He is in awe of the laws of God.
• President Nelson finds joy in serving others.
• President Nelson knows that the Lord loves effort.
• President Nelson never delays. His moto is "why not now?"

Later that day we had our first April 2022 General Conference meeting to kick off all the tasks we need to do before April 2nd, 2022. We later went over all the missionary responsibilities with our team so we can divide it up. We don't have that much to do, but we we do have to do is timely and needs to be done in order. It is looking like things are opening up a bit more. I'm hoping we can have more Interpreters this year. I'm not expecting a full complement, but it would be nice if we could double what we had on October.

After that meeting Elder Wilcox and I had our Leadership Pattern meeting. It is such an incredible program. We are learning so much, not just how to be a better leader, but so much about ourselves and how to be a better follower and servant of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I know I am growing by leaps and bounds. Our Zone got permission to offer the classes to our missionaries. The Zone leaders asked if they could hijack our Family Home Evening group to be one of the classes. So starting February 14th, we will be starting all over in the program. I have already learned so much I'm ready to jump right back in and see how much I've progressed. It should be GREAT!

Tuesday evening we had a Worldwide Missionary Devotional with Elder D. Todd Christofferson.  We had 9 languages with 8 of them in SLC and one tieline. I love getting to mingle with the Interpreters. Since the latest tightening of COVID restrictions we have been serving the meals. I think we will probably be able to stop doing that soon. It has been fun. The devotional was really good. Aaron was the Supervisor over the Devotional. We took him home with us because he had to get up early for the Roots Tech event in the morning.

Wednesday morning started with the 3rd session of Roots Tech (the first 2 sessions were the previous week dubbing into English.) The Linfords were supporting that group. This is one of the sessions we planned for more people than we actually had. It worked out because for breakfast they just went to the cafeteria and got what they wanted. They gave their name to a particular cashier and all was good. We didn't pay for more meals than we needed. They were supposed to end at 1, but not only did we have trouble with who the interpreters were; but, the interpreters had trouble with the recordings. There were lots of retakes and they went over about 1 1/2 hours. SOOOO Aaron, the Supervisor, quickly chatted Elder Wilcox and me to see if there was something we could do to provide lunch. So we pulled out the menu and I created a spreadsheet with all the people we THOUGHT were there so they could pick what meal they wanted. They had a break coming up so they selected it then. That was when we found out nearly half of the original list were now tieline and not SLC people. So we added all the food requests into the spreadsheet, removed all the extra people, added the engineers and supervisor, added the PRJ (billing) number and event title to the spreadsheet and printed 6 copies. Each of us 4 missionaries took a copy and the other two were given to the 2 cashiers that we needed to use. We went down and picked up all the meals and took them back upstairs so they could each lunch. They finally finished about 2:30.

We had our Team meeting at 2:00. It went over and I had to leave at 3:00 to attend my PLUNET meeting. I'm making SLOW progress on getting things fixed but at least they are getting addressed. About an hour after that meeting it was time to get set up for our Roots Tech evening event. We had about 32 Interpreters for dinner that night and it took all four of us to serve and clean up again. Apparently they learned a lot from the morning experience because the evening people only went over 1/2 an hour.  We sent the Linfords home early because they were there early that morning. I think we left around 10 that night. We took Aaron home with us again as he had to be back for the morning session of Roots Tech.

Thursday was a repeat of Wednesday. We did the sessions 5 and 6 which were the second two videos. This time Elder Wilcox and I covered the morning because the Linfords were giving our Thursday morning Zone Devotional. We were able to watch from the office. The Interpreters were doing mic checks during that time. Then everyone had breakfast. I would love to tell you all about the Roots Tech videos, but we didn't get to see anything. So I guess you (and I) will have to sign up and watch it for ourselves. We only had 2 Italian interpreters with us in SLC that morning. Everyone else was tieline. They did go over just a bit so we provided lunch again but Elder Wilcox and I handled it all. Elder Linford was busy trying to get all the people straight in PLUNET so we could approve the jobs so they could create invoices. I won't say anything other than it was a bit of a mess!

That evening we did the last Roots Tech session for this "main event".  We had the most people of all in SLC that night with over 40. We even ran out of some of the food, but that was because Elder Wilcox and Elder Linford were scooping REALLY BIG servings. lol Luckily there was plenty of other food so no one went hungry. It was our turn to go home early so we left shortly after cleaning up everything. I helped Elder Linford with the PLUNET from the night before and then we left.

Friday started the NEXT major event for Roots Tech. This one should be much easier than the last one. It is entitled Family Discovery Day featuring Elder Soares and Family. The Soares family was in Brazil walking around and reminiscing about living their. It was recorded in Portuguese. So, on Friday, we had a delightful husband and wife couple on our Portuguese team dub it into English. Next week the same 13 languages will interpret from English back into their native languages. Some of the things that were learned from the last event. Aaron is NOT going to let the language teams dictate who is going to do the recordings. He is going to tell them who is doing what. That should eliminate the massive changes in people. There were other things they learned so hopefully we won't go over like we did last week either. And thankfully it is only 1 day. We will do 2 session on the 16th and that is all. We ACTUALLY went home at 3:30 on Friday!!!!

We also started a new event on Friday, called "Feb 2022 Caribbean Area Meetings" which the Linfords took care of. Friday afternoon was the Member Devotional. EARLY Saturday morning we did the Missionary Devotional that started at 5:00 AM for us so we could set up. The interpreters arrived at 5:30 for breakfast. That was a very fun devotional. Most of it was in Spanish, although we interpreted it into French and Haitian (also in Dutch on Friday night). That ended at 8:30 AM. It was so fun to hear our interpreters interpret into English. We normally don't get to hear them do that. I love being able to say, "that's Nikolaj" or "that's Maritza".  

At 8:00 AM the people for the next event showed up for Breakfast. This was the Utah Pleasant Grove (South) PLC/CLC. PLC stands for Priesthood Leadership Council and CLC stands for Combined Leadership Council. Elder Wilcox and I covered Saturday, since the Linfords covered the Friday events. Have I mentioned how much we love and appreciate the Linfords? The only problem with our Utah Pleasant Grove event was for some reason they were unable to broadcast it to our screen. I guess that makes it easier to concentrate on the work I was doing for HawkSoft, lol.  It also made it easier for Eunlan, our Supervisor for both events that day, to say, "Sister Wilcox, can you help me with this?" or "Sister Wilcox, will you make this RUSH Plunet order for me?" I LOVE Eunlan...especially they way she pronounces my name! She always makes it into a question. lol  We invited the Beechs to come for a tour so they showed up around noon on Saturday. The timing worked out well and we could show them around so they could see what we do. They really enjoyed that.

That about wraps up our week. It looks like next week is a little lighter. Wednesday and Thursday only...at least that is all we have right now.  hahahaha

I hope you have a Wonderful Valentine's Day. Enjoy your LOVED ones. Oh, I almost forgot some VERY IMPORTANT news. Our grandson, Montana just got engaged to a delightful young woman, Lauren, whom we love very much. We couldn't be happier!

Love to you all💖

Mom and Dad,

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox