The Randomness of our Mission

Some one asked what we do. It might be easier to tell you what we don't do here. But I can tell you what we do here is often random. We never really know what will come up from day to day.  I have sewn curtains for missionary apartments, hemmed long sleeve shirts to make them short sleeve. And today someone asked if I could help her alter a wedding dress. I have written an Emergency Plan for our mission - just in case. I have emailed people from Germany to London, to Brazil to Utah trying to find things the mission needs and to get them here. I have learned how to make bank transfers to cover rent and write financial journal entries. Robert has done a whole lot of financial stuff that he has not even attempted to explain to me, given blessings, hung curtains, fixed toilets, race missionaries to the emergency room, given talks, started teaching his second Temple Prep class, this one in Assomada, in the middle of the island, given 30 minutes worth of training each week in his High Council meetings and has tried his best to help me learn Portuguese. The latter takes a back seat usually. I don't know if it is really because we run out of time or if it is so painful for him he avoids it. Ha! What we do together is wait in long lines at banks. Go to the Electra place and gather the bills for all the missionary apartments and then come back three days later with the check to pay them. (We made friends with the clerk there when we bought her a new stapler. She has to staple a receipt to each bill and we have a lot of bills and her staple jammed about every third one.)  We go to the post office twice a week and pick up lots and lots of mail. Go to the Despachant's office about four times a month trying to push what has arrived here, other than by mail, through customs. When we have passed through that hurdle we go to the airport to get the Chefe to clear it. That wait can be as long as four hours. Once he clears it, we go across the parking lot to pick it up and pay the storage fees that have accumulated while we waited on the Despachant and Chefe. Then we go back to the mission office with all our goods. Oh if only it was finally over. But no. We have to send out what we have received to the various islands. Really we only have to send them to two other islands and the Zone Leaders take it from there. What goes to Fogo goes on the Fast Ferry. We go to the docks (right by the crazy busy fish market) and load it on a truck there that gets it on the Ferry. The fast ferry gets it there in 3 hours. It usually takes us longer than that to pay for it and have it loaded. Stuff going to the northern islands goes by ship to Mindelo. That is a crazy adventure. You go to the center of town and pay for the shipping of your stuff on a Thursday. Friday you go to another place to drop it off. But you don't really drop it off. You wait while they load it on a truck. It is a flat bed and they load it a hundred feet high and then they drive it to the ship - well right onto the ship. The truck literally makes the 3 day voyage. Once at its destination the truck is driven off the boat and is unloaded. Between the fast ferry and the slow boat it takes a better part of the week to get it all shipped out. And then the airport calls and tells us another shipment has arrived and we start all over again.
This last shipment was crazier than usual because we were very anxious about it. We ran out of copies of the Book of Mormon! Sort of hard to run a mission without them. So when they finally arrived from Germany, we raced to the Despachants. Got past that hurdle in five days. Next to the Chefe that took two days because his office closed early the first day. The second day we were so optimistic. The Chefe was going to be there so we hired a truck  - and waited. Now it is bright and sunny 360 days out of the year here but not this day. The clouds kept getting darker and darker. And the wait kept getting longer and longer. Finally a signature! - and a down pour, a Texas style downpour. That was random and to make it even more random a herd of cows strolled through the flooding parking lot in the middle of the down pour. I think it was tender mercy because it broke the tension as we just all started laughing. So when the rain showed not signs of letting up, we sent the truck home -after paying the driver for his time - with the agreement he would get more if he come back the next day. The next day we brought home what was suppose to be 1700 copies of the Book of Mormon. Unfortunately they made a mistake and only sent 1100, the rest of the books were triple combinations. Sigh. But I am sure we can put those to good use.
Tomorrow we start the process of dividing the books up and preparing them for the fast ferry and slow boat. But for all the crazy stress and busyness of it all, it really is wonderful. Our trips to Assomada are amazing. We go to the top of three mountains and down again before arriving there. Sometime we are driving through the clouds- literally. Assomada is actually on a very high plateau. About three blocks from the church it just drops off. It is so picturesque and green. It rains more there and it is the mango capital of Cape Verde. Last week while there we stopped to drop off a member of the ward and spotted this. Two monkeys. And who knows what we will do or see tomorrow.