October 19, 2007 - Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Happy Conference everybody! It was great and, as usual, an adventure watching conference here in Mongolia. We were helping the branch members get the first session going Saturday morning and the sound was just horrible! It sounded like the MoTab was singing while chewing tinsel and everyone was all restless wondering if they would have to listen to the whole of conference like this. After a few minutes of fiddling and blowing on the DVD and dancing around we finally found the problem: one of the cords was missing the necessary adaptor so someone had cut off the end and jammed the wires into the slot, solving the no-adaptor problem and creating a whole lot of new ones. Needless to say, we found a new cord, and all was cool.

That is, until the Sunday morning session rolled around. The English DVDs (so lovingly and carefully churned out at 52x by the folks at headquarters and then shipped out before the closing prayer is done) were completely whacked up. We, the five English missionaries meeting at the old central building, tried to be patient with all the skips and blips (the opening 3-minute prayer was 5 minutes longer than it should have been and almost completely incomprehensible) but we didn’t make it any further than the first talk. Hearing the “edited” version of President Henry B. Eyring’s talk produced some interesting nuggets of gospel wisdom: “By regular daily prayer we can enjoy the comforting influence of –blip!—outer darkness.” We finally called it quits when the picture started unscrambling on us and a second mouth appeared in Eyring’s forehead. We poked our head into the Mongolian room and whispered to our Mongolian companions to stay put (I was temporarily companions with the other American sister, Sister Morgan of Alaska), and we jumped in some taxis and zoomed off to the Bayanzurkh building, hoping that the American missionaries there were having better luck with their DVD.

It turns out all the Sunday morning DVD’s were messed up so we just watched Sunday Afternoon in the morning and then we went up to President Andersen’s house on the 5th floor where he and his family were watching conference. It’s always hard to stick my head in President Andersen’s home and see it done up all American like and smell the chicken and potatoes and nummy American food Sister Andersen was making. Just like home…mmm…anyway, we grabbed his somewhat-nicer copy of the Sunday morning session and watched it in the afternoon. Conference was a little bit out of order, but awesome nonetheless.

Well, I’ve been kickin’ around doing missionary work with a mini-missionary this week. I thought I was doing all of the work before with a brand new missionary but with a civilian companion…whew! It’s okay though, because Saruultugs is awesome. She’s getting an up close and personal view of missionary work and I think she likes it. She’s planning on serving a mission next year. She’s picking up on things pretty quickly, except for all the prayers. We pray a lot. Like, a whole lot. She’s usually up and ready to move on and I have to yell out “zalbiriya!”

Sister Khorloo comes back tomorrow night. I sent my camera with her so next week we’ll have some way awesome Hong Kong-y pictures to share. We also have two investigators going in for baptismal interviews tomorrow, Anudari and Namuunaa. I can’t wait to send you pictures of Namuunaa’s 500-watt smile. She’s the cutest girl ever, and she’s a Photoshop wiz (her dad runs an advertising business).

Later skaters!