Whatcha doin?

Someone suggested to us that people might want to know a little more about what we do. So here goes:

Short version: I'm the mission secretary. Lee is the mission finance man.

Longer version: Our first goal and purpose is to support and help the Mission President and his wife in their very important (and huge) assignment. Anything they ask, we try our best to do. We try to look for ways to support them.

Each Wednesday night, we teach a free English at the church. Lee and I are teaching the advanced English class, and we really enjoy it. We usually have between 10-15 people there. We have been assigned three families who we home teach, which means at least once a month we make an appointment to go to their homes and give them an inspirational or uplifting message and see if there is anything we can do to help them.

In the office, we try to make everyone feel welcome and do our best to answer questions and keep things running smoothly. Our year and a half presence here adds continuity and is important to the mission.

Me with Sister Baird and a fairly new convert to the Church.
When not posing for photos we were putting out a nice meal.

And most fun, we get to interact with the missionaries who frequently come into the mission home for various reasons, to enjoy them and love them and let them know they are wonderful. (I just wish I could hug them.) Before senior missionaries started serving missions, missionaries had to come into the office and spend their precious time doing office work, instead of sharing the Gospel with people. We enable more missionaries to be doing the important stuff.

Japan has a great mail system. It's different from the US, but works really well. I'm surprised at how quickly and efficiently they get mail from point A to point B, especially within Japan. Our mailmen trek up four flights of stairs and sometimes we see four or more mailmen a day. They bring packages for the missionaries, and if I get up from my desk, find out who the package is going to, and stamp a little label with the missionary's address, the mailman kindly waits, takes the box back downstairs and gets it right back into the system of sending it where it belongs.

But the letters--he just drops off with a rubber band around all of them. We get an average of 30 letters a day, most of them to the missionaries. Right now, we have about 100 missionaries, and they are scattered around the mission in about 46 different apartments. Some of them are in Kanazawa, on the west coast of Japan and about a 3.5 hour drive, and up in the mountains above Nagano where the Winter Olympics were held a few years back. One set of elders are close enough to ride their bikes to the mission office. When we get these letters, I need to read the missionary's name, find out where he is located, and get a stamp out of a drawer where we have about 50 different address stamps, stamp a label, and then attach the label on the letter/postcard/package in a way that best covers the mission address and leaves their name, but doesn't block any of the message (especially if it's on a post card.) Then I have to stamp it with a small red stamp that tells the mailman it is being forwarded. It goes out the next day. Mail is delivered Monday through Saturday, but forwarded mail or mail that we generate in the office is never taken on Saturday.

I prepare and send out letters--lots of them. When we get notified each Tuesday of new missionaries who have accepted calls to the Japan Nagoya Mission, I send him back a packet of information along with a great welcome letter from the president. He usually has around two or three months before he leaves for the Mission Training Center. He is at the Mission Training Center for about two months. When he is one month from finishing at the MTC and coming to Japan, I send him another letter with more instructions.

Throughout a missionary's two years in Japan, he will receive opportunities in various leadership positions, especially if he is an exceptional missionary. He will be asked to be a trainer of new missionaries coming into the field, a senior companion, a district leader, a zone leader, or to be an assistant to the president, or the commissarian or recorder. When any of those things happen, and they do a lot, I get to send letters of congratulations to him and his parents.

Five months before it's time for a missionary to finish his mission, I send him a letter asking for information that will help us at the office get ready for him to leave. For instance, we need to know which airport he would like fly "home" to, how he would like his name to appear on his official Certificate of Release, and if there have been any changes in addresses of the people we send letters to.

At three months before the end of the mission, I send letters to the missionary, parents, bishop and stake president with preliminary flight plans and other details about the end of the mission. At one month, I repeat that with final flight plans and the Certificate of Release to the Stake President, so that when the missionary arrives home, he can be "officially" released as a full-time missionary.

On the day that the missionary leaves the mission, he spends time at the mission home. Several important things happen, but my role is to see that the missionary gets a special book. It contains a copy of his first welcome letter, a picture of the mission president, his wife and family, pictures of the missionary's first day here two years ago, with his first missionary companion, a very lovely certificate (special paper with a gold trim around the edges) congratulating him for being a Finisher, for a successful two years of working hard for the benefit of other people. This special book also contains a copy of every letter the missionary wrote to the mission president, usually one letter a week for two years. A great memory book. It is nicely bound and has the final letter from the mission president inside as well.

With a batch of missionaries coming in and leaving every six weeks, the letter writing is one eternal round, and I am doing letters several times a week. So getting letters out is one of my most time-consuming tasks.

But there are a number of other miscellaneous smaller things that I do. The phone rings a lot at a mission office, and trying to understand what the person is saying in Japanese adds a level of complexity. While I am picking up a few phrases that help me communicate, I often have to get help from a missionary or Elder Barney. I do filing, emails, keep track who is where and when that will change, and generally keep the office running.

I have been asked to do the mission blog, which the Baird's would like to have made into a book (or two or three) at the end of their mission. I have been asked to go back 18 months and catch up for lost time, writing about incoming and outgoing missionaries, events (which includes the effects of last year's tsunami on the mission), and stories. I have my work cut out for me there.

I also get to help Sister Baird with meals whenever there is a group of missionaries or others who come to the mission home. The Bairds feed missionaries (varying numbers) two meals when they arrive, two meals when they leave the mission, 20 or so missionaries at monthly zone leaders conference and all 100 of them for semi-annual mission conference. They frequently invite people for Family Home Evening and other dinners. Visiting authorities regularly come and stay at the mission home as well. Sister Baird, the mission president's wife, is forever feeding groups, but I love working with her, and I love that I don't have to plan it. She's a great cook (too good--and I'm enjoying her food too much!) It's fun to work with her and talk as we put together lasagna, or a waffle breakfast for 18 hungry boys, and do the cleanup after. I really enjoy that part.

This is the Meito Ward building where we go to church.
On the right is the mission home; our office is on the top floor.
We live about 250 steps away.

The mission office is clean and fairly modern. Of course, there is no central heating. In winter, I'm lucky to have a little space heater beside my desk and I use it most days to keep my legs warm. When the wind is blowing outside, which it frequently is, the windows in our office rattle. They are single pane windows. I have worn my coat all day more often than not. Lee and I are in neighboring offices and have a nice view, both from my office and from his. In winter it is cloudy and stormy most days, or hazy with smog. But on a few days we've been able to see the snow covered mountains. They are beautiful and they aren't that far away. Maybe 30 miles.

I'm having Lee type up his work description and I'll put it in another blog. But until then, I know you are dying to know the names of a couple more beauty shops: 


 I'd go to "Hello Beauty," in hopes that it would help, but I'm not sure about "Moat Hair." Let me know if you know what moat hair looks like. Then I can watch for it and send a picture.