On Monday October 25 we started our missionary training in Provo Utah at the Missionary Training Center in Provo Utah. It is next door to BYU. We heard the crowd cheering at the football game last night until after midnight. BYU won. A lot of the training is on how to share your feelings with other people. I liked the class on listening. I learned that I need to focus on understanding what the other person is saying and not focus on how I am going to respond. We have one more week of training and have tickets to fly to Santiago on November 9th. There is a vaccine pass that we need to have approved before we can leave that could delay our departure.
It is customary to take a picture of you pointing to your destination on the big map. We are pointing to Robinson Crusoe Island, about 500 miles off the coast of Chile. That is where we expect to go after we spend a couple of months in Santiago. There are people here that are training with us that are going to Albania, Bosnia, Pakistan, Uganda, England, Sierra Leone, and Knoxville. Some appear to be older than us in and not the most mobile. For some of them this will be their second or third such assignment.
Manual Sandoval, our friend from Columbia that is studying in Salt Lake City came to see us. His English speaking skills are greatly improved.
We have had nice weather and scenery this week. My brother John and sister in law Dixie came to town and spoiled us with a nice dinner.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is doing family history in a big way. The Family Search website has some activities. One compares your face to the faces of ancestors that have a picture in the database and determines who look most like. Here are my results.
Another fun activity on Family Search is Find Relatives Around Me. When you have the app running on your phone it will search for people around you that have the app running as well and tell you how you are related to them. We found my third cousin twice removed that way. It shows how you are related. He is a descendent of my great great grandfather's second wife who is the daughter of Mariah Brooks who I look like. See the picture above. Family Search is designed to help you create a family tree and extend back in time as far as possible. These fun activities are a fun side line.
It has been a good week. We are looking forward to getting all our paper work completed so we can leave for Santiago on the 9th.
