Friday, September 12, 2008

One More Night

The Collins are here! They are our replacement for the mission office duties. We will evacuate our apartment Sunday after church and move into the mission home into the General Authority bedroom with a king-sized bed. We are almost packed, now we get to clean.

We will attend a baptism today and dad will give the Holy Ghost talk. We are speaking in church on Sunday. Ironically, I will be speaking on honesty after I had to tell a white lie to get someone out of immigration at the airport on Wednesday. I mentioned it to the mission president and he paused and said, "Have Elder Ross give the talk".

I have mixed feelings about the move. We won't be in the heart of the action as Trinidad continues the march toward stakehood. We enjoy getting together and visiting with the other couples. We have been a tremendous support for one another. It has been fun interacting with all the Elders. Dad is excited to go, since office stuff isn't his thing. He has, however, enjoyed driving the big van! We have taken it to the airport five times in the last 2 weeks. Besides being huge, it is not an automatic transmission! He did awesome going through the gears left handed. Just don't ask him to take it off the highway!

We are anxious to follow up on a Dr. Jones (in education) we met at Price Smart when we stopped for boxes. She approached us and gave us her phone number in Tobago. Her mother is a member living in Florida.



The van driver is ready to go!


The front of the Piarco (Port of Spain) Airport located in Arima in the middle of the north part of the island.


Transfer day at the airport.

We took Amanda to lunch after picking her up at the airport. She is from Guyana and had to come to Trinidad to be set apart before heading to Santo Domingo to the MTC. We took her back the next day to catch her flight. She will be an awesome missionary!
She arrived at the airport in Guyana to find she didn't have a live plane ticket. Another tender mercy, there was a seat and Elder Larson paid for her ticket to Trinidad. She couldn't get through customs at our airport because she didn't have a ticket that said she was continuing on the next day. We visited the information desk and showed our copy of her itinery (which wasn't real because the ticket hadn't been finalized) and the distinguished looking gentleman called back to immigration and said to let her through. The Lord loves his missionaries.

Transfer day is always wild and crazy. We picked up 7 Elders from the airport at 11 am after dropping 7 off at 5:30 am, just before dawn. The airport is a drop spot in addition to those who fly in and out as we move Elders around the island. It was so fun to watch them greet each other and quickly catch up of investigators they had taught, etc.


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