Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Going to the Mission Training Center

MTC has been an interesting experience. We have a wonderful group to study with. They are all first time humanitarian but not their first mission. They are going to Cambodia, Marshall Islands, Fiji, Jamaica, and Brazil. All are very nervous but anxious to go to work. It is that fear of the unknown and a question of what you should fill your bags up with when you have such limited space to travel.

We spend one day touring the church welfare system including Welfare Square, LDS Employment and LDS Charities. We had lunch with the managers of humanitarian services and were given a pep talk by Glenn Rudd the father of the welfare program. He just happens to be a good friend of the Barlow family as Grandpa Barlow served with him when he was mission president in Georgia. He is 92 years old and comes to work every day keeping on with his good works.

We had a wonderful devotional on Tuesday with a talk by Elder Haphen counseling us to not expect our testimony to be sure or totally unwavering but to keep the commandments, be obedient and work hard and our testimony will grow on a daily bases and we will be strengthened with all we do.

The Livingstons, our mission president in the DR Congo invited us to dinner to meet our new mission president, Pres Jackson and his wife (they will start their service in July in the Kampala Uganda Mission).  Also at dinner were the Moons, our dear Congo buddies and the Andrus who are opening up Rwanda and will fly with us to Uganda. 

So we are now ready for our new African adventure. Farrell says it sounds a lot better to be going to the “Emerald of Africa” than to the “Heart of Darkness.”

We fly to Uganda on March 15th.

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