Highlights of October 2022

This has been an incredibly productive and BUSY month!

On the 23rd of September, our oldest grandchild, beautiful Janill, became engaged to Devin Lott. We arranged to have a date with them over zoom just a few weeks ago! It was a blast! They are adorable! They are getting married in December!

Our first P-Day (preparation/play day) was an outing to see the Broadway Musical "Frozen" held in downtown Perth, just 25 minutes away! Fantastic! Absolutely amazing! We picked up a quick yummy lunch in a quaint cafe. I can't say enough about all the great food we are eating!

On The very next day, Oct. 6th, 2022, our beautiful little Hyrum Nephi Williams, 4th son and 5th child of Nephi and Hannah, entered the world. We call him our spud, because it was the spud harvest in Rexburg, when he was born. Coming to mortality 9 lbs. and 2 oz., he is adorable and perfect! We now have 20 girls and 22 boys in 2022!! How about that?

A little bushel of sweetness!

On October 8, 2022 Kendra Janet Mitchell was baptized and confirmed a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on her mother's birthday. We are so happy for you Kendra!

Now the craziness begins:

First of all, we get a speeding ticket in the mail 15 days after the offence! Luckily, I keep good records of each day, and Elder Kahmann was driving that day. Ha! Nonetheless, I was freaked out that this would be the first of many tickets, as I knew on the days that I drove, I was going over the speed limit, simply because I could not focus on staying on the correct side of road and watching my speed at the same time. Here, in Australia, they have speed cameras everywhere. If you go past a camera, there is no mercy if you are 2 kilometers over the speed limit.

The good news is, we are averaging a 35% exchange rate reduction on everything we buy with our credit card, so instead of paying $100. we only had to pay $65.

I love how my wonderful companion, Elder Kahmann often says, "Where much is given, much is required." However, his exuberance in moving forward sometimes causes me to feel like I am packing chocolates in the factory from a conveyor belt that speeds up every few minutes. Have you ever watched that episode of "I love Lucy?" If you haven't, take 2 minutes and watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3axU2b0dDk

Shortly after arriving in the mission field, Elder Kahmann reached out through email to all the stake and ward leaders in our Perth mission introducing us as the new Welfare Self-Reliance (WSR) missionaries. He told them we would be happy to speak in every ward sacrament meeting, attend Bishop's councils, stake councils, do 5th Sunday presentations, and support them in anyway that we can. You have to understand that the 4 stakes in the Perth mission cover 1/3 of the country of Australia. Before you know it, we are scheduled out until March of 2023.

This last Sunday (Oct. 30th) we traveled to Bunbury ward, (about 2 hours from our flat) starting at 6:30 am, where we did a 5th Sunday presentation. Then an hour later we spoke in the next ward in the building (Leschenault ward), and then did another presentation for their second hour 5th Sunday. We received 3 invitations to dinner, but couldn't accept any of them, because we had scheduled to take dinner to our WSR stake specialist couple in that stake, who had just lost her mother. We got home about 8:30 pm.

Bishop Stanley's sweet wife let me hold and cuddle her beautiful newborn to soften the blow of not being able to touch or hold my last 2 precious grandsons. I loved looking into this little baby's eyes and kissing her neck as she acted as proxy.

Other assignments that we are taking care of include:

Making Bedding Bags for the incoming missionaries. This month, we received 20 new missionaries and one senior missionary couple. We purchase the bedding which includes pillow, sheets, mattress cover, doona (a quilt cover), quilt and a blanket. The missionaries can have new bedding and pay $150 or used bedding for $10. The used bedding has to be washed and sorted. The assistants help us bag the bedding and mark as female, male, clean or new. Sometimes we open used bags that you would not like to smell or see. We find interesting accessories modeled by these cute assistants. We forgot to take a picture of the finished bedding bags. It's quite a project. (I promise I will get one)

Departing missionary seminars: We do these every 6 weeks. We did our second one this month and had 5 missionaries. We improved upon our last one and had a lot of fun. These wonderful elders showed up an hour early.

Send off at Zone Conference: Elder Hansen, Elder Lafaele, Elder Van DerLinden, Elder Saifitu, Elder Ta'ala (And Elder Lafele again) They really go all out here! It's crazy

Our seminar:

Elder Lafaele, Elder Hansen, Elder Saifitu, Elder Ta'ala, Elder Van DerLindon

Emotional Resilience Training for the missionaries. Our WSR supervisor in Melbourne, Ricky Tukukino, encouraged us to do emotional resilience training with all the missionaries, as there is a high need for that. (here's a picture of him in the white shirt. The other 2 couples are also WSR missionary couples in working in Eastern Australia. This is a training slide from one of these good meetings.)

When we first talked to President Stone about it, he said he could not see how the missionaries could fit one more thing in. One morning Elder Kahmann and I woke up and started our companion study. We had both received some revelation and ideas about how to make this happen. We were absolutely both "on fire". We went to work and drew up the plan. We presented it to President Stone, and he loved it. Just a week before we put the first one on the calendar, we learned in our weekly Thursday morning WSR meeting that using the Adjusting To Missionary Life manual is encouraged. We went to work and created a power point based on the ATML manual supplemented with the Emotional Resilience course for lesson one. Elder Kahmann worked with the assistants and president to construct and solve the momentous task of figuring out how and where to combine and meet with all 12 districts within the 5 weeks we have in each transfer to do this ER training in district councils. We then will do one lesson a month for the whole mission. Next month, we'll figure out lesson 2. We will do a total of 6 lessons through the year, then repeat. So far in October, we have done 5 districts. Here's pictures of about 1/2 of them.

We had a very tender experience just days after beginning these meetings. Elder Kahmann put our phone numbers in the slides and invited them to call us anytime if they have any questions about anything that we talked about or any concerns. He added, "especially Sister Kahmann, as she is a trained therapist." A couple days later, a missionary texted Elder Kahmann and asked if he might talk with me. We arranged a call. This sweet elder confided that he had been struggling for several weeks with deep discouragement and was having thoughts of wanting to go home. He was very teary and struggling. I was able to talk him "off the roof," encourage him with some specific tools, and connect with him with President Stone. The missionary asked if his parents could talk to me. We were able to nip it in the bud, so to speak, and get the missionary the help he needed. This seemed to be a miracle. We feel like these trainings are so timely and needed. This was a missionary that we would have never guessed was discouraged at all.

Elder Kahmann shares this wonderful story of President Eyring in his talks: He was told early in his life by his district president, "Hal, when you meet members for the first time, if you treat them as if they have a serious problem, you will be right more than half of the time. After 50 years or more of service, President Eyring shared - that from his experience, that estimate is too low.

One of the bishops we talked to after one of our talks, told us that his highest expenditure from fast offerings each month is for professional fees for mental health. He was on totally on board to start implementing the wonderful resources that the church has to offer in a more aggressive way.

To see the amazing plethora of resources, go to the church website, click on life help, see the list of topics. Click on anyone of them and prepare to be amazed.

Emotional Resilience 10 week course on zoom:

Elder Kahmann wanted to start a course for outlying areas and branches (up to 1600 kilometers away) on zoom. So he reached out, and we started facilitating our first one with 7 members, and have had 3 weeks so far. It has been fabulous. We all love it. One of our group members (James) is not a member of the church, but lives in our ward. He is currently taking the discussions and is eating it up. We had he and his brother (Daniel) over for dinner a few Sundays ago.

Love, share and Invite:

We have been blessed with an angel in our life. Her name is Cindy Holloway. This is her in the middle. She was baptized 4 years ago, but did not have a testimony and was not sure she even believed in God at that point. Within a time, she became inactive. She started struggling with depression and anxiety. In July of this year she decided to come back to church. A sister, Janine Oates, the stake Relief Society president saw her in a meeting and felt an overwhelming impression to call her as her secretary. We first met Cindy in our ward, on the day she was being set apart for her new calling. When Janine introduced us to her, she turned away and refused to talk to us. We went home from church. As I was changing my clothes, I was having flash backs of the 2 sisters in my Syracuse ward when I was serving as the Relief Society president, that were HARD cases. I told Elder Kahmann in no uncertain terms that this sister could just be grumpy, but it wasn't going to ruin my mission. Well, a couple hours, later, we get a phone call from this 32 year old single sister. She asked us if she could bring something to our door. I met her at the locked gate to our flat, walked her upstairs and asked her if she wanted to come in. (To be continued: in Part 2 of this blog

We have had to jump over so many hurdles this month, and last month, such as technical difficulties and technical difficulties, that we become totally exhausted. We missed 2 weeks of P-days, so on the 24th, we went to the zoo in Perth! It was totally relaxing and so nice. We just love the animals here. I will complete this post in part 2. (I've already lost the first draft and had to redo 2-3 hours of work.)