Hello to all of our family and friends. It has been a few weeks since our last post, so we decided we better get on here and let everyone know what we have been up to. Contrary to popular belief, we have not been doing much VACATIONING lately. In our last blog, we mentioned we had just returned from Argentina where we learned about many changes that would be taking place in our missionary call. We were advised when we were in the MTC (Mission Training Center) last summer that these changes would be coming and that we would need to be patient in those first few months. Well, our days of tribulation (waiting) are over, and we are indeed very busy.
We have moved to some new offices about 1-2 miles away from the church headquarters here in Santiago (where we have been working). It takes Evone and I about 45 minutes to make the commute each morning. We take a bus for part of the way and then walk the rest. At the end of the day, we walk all the way back to the apartment. Very good exercise for us. Our new offices are in a very typical large city business area with many new high rise buildings. Our office for example is on the 13th floor of I don't know how many. It's big. We have been told that they are trying to get out of that office and move us back to the church headquarter building, but that could take months, and we will probably be through with our mission before that change takes place.
We are very busy developing a calendar of workshops which we will be teaching. Our responsibility is to coordinate all of the activities of the office (career workshops, planning for success workshops, accelerated employment work groups, English classes and beginning computer skills workshops). We have people who are members of our church and many people who are not members of the church who come into our office looking for help. We are also still very involved with the church's Perpetual Education Fund, which is a program whereby the church makes loans to help young people get technical degrees which hopefully leads to them finding jobs and becoming self reliant. The work is very rewarding, especially when you receive emails and phone calls from participants who are having much success in their endeavors be it work or the their studies.
We will be conducting our first of many career workshop in just 3 weeks. I have done training my entire career and ordinarily this
would be a fairly easy workshop to do. However, having to do it all in
Spanish has certainly caused a little angst with me. Evone keeps
saying "What are you worried about, you've done this a million times". I
then quickly reminder her, yes, but not in another language. Oh well,
very exciting and busy times ahead.
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| Observing a master teacher Maurico teach a Career Workshop to a group of missionaries from the Santiago East mission getting ready to go home from their mission in less than a week |
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| A group of missionaries from the Santiago West mission at the end of their Career Workshop. The group includes three "gringo's" who have to "re-learn" English before looking for a job! |
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| The church office building where we were working... now we bus and walk about 2 miles. |
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| Never a dull moment walking home from the office -- this day there was a street band! |
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| Last Saturday a group of Senior Missionaries went to a Chilean Antiquities Museum -- Richard stayed home and did the "feria" run for our fresh fruits and veggies |
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| We stopped in a market area that had the most amazing array of foods. We all decided to try a "Completo" which is a favorite Chilean fast food -- a hot dog smothered in smashed avacado, chopped tomato and lots of mayonnaise! |
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| My first Completo -- probably my last one! I was not impressed. |
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| Just one restaurant and its dishes... and we chose HOT DOGS! |
