Dear Family and Friends, March
3, 2014
Woke this
morning at 6:30 am to a world of white. Thought I would go down and sweep the
snow off the car. Got on my sweatshirt, coat and gloves, took the broom and
headed down stairs. Opened the front door, no one had been out of our apartment
building yet this morning. Took my first step, my feet went up, my bottom came
down hard, and I slid to the bottom of the steps. They weren’t really steps,
just a filled in sloping sheet of frozen sleet. The sidewalk had a buildup of
about 3”, but not with snow, but 3” of frozen white sleet. My feet didn’t even
make a depression. I unlocked the car but all doors were frozen shut. I banged
against all of them until I finally got a back door to open. I crawled into the back seat,
reached over the seats, put the key in the ignition and started the car. As it
was warming up I tried to sweep of the snow, but the white stuff didn’t budge.
It was a solid block. As the windows got warmer I was able to get under the
white stuff and start chipping off small chunks. I heard a guy down at the end
of the parking lot trying to get his pickup with big tires, out of the parking
lot. It wasn’t moving, just a lot of spinning tires. After about 10 minutes he
got backed up enough to start forward motion. Our drive way has a gentle slope
up to the road. He didn’t make it. He had to back down and get another long run
at the road.
After that I finally got the white
stuff off the windows, I got into the car and thought I could back it up a bit
, to make a path. It never even backed up one inch, I tried forward, again not
even an inch. Guess we are what you called ice bound. My body still hasn’t
recovered from the sudden jolting motion of coming down hard on my bottom.
Came back
upstairs and decided to write to my family instead of battling such a formidable
foe. Then the Elders and Sisters came
over to use our computer to write emails to the president and their families.
They have stayed for lunch since no one can go anywhere. I finally have the computer
back. Its hard to get things done when your apartment is full of missionaries.
Last Friday
there was a senior missionary meeting in Little Rock at the Mission presidents
home. There are about 13 missionary couples in the mission. We were all interviewed
by the president. We had a pot luck lunch. We had a meeting with instructions.
We all got a chance to talk about what we were doing in our areas. It was over
3 hour drive down. We met the Lockett’s from Blytheville, Arkansas in Jonesboro
and they rode down with us. We got back to Jonesboro about 5:00 pm. Got home
about 5:30. At the meeting we were told that the five stake presidents all got
together and decided to increase the number of convert baptisms for 2014 to
800. We had the goal of 636 that was set by the missionaries which was very do able and realistic. Last
year we attained 521. So with increased missionaries we felt we could reach
636. Our missionaries are willing to take on the new challenge. They are
faithful.
We get a
new mission president this summer. He is a native convert from Fiji.
And has two children ages 17 and 10 that will be coming with
their parents. President Peterson isn’t
worried about the new President but he is worried about his wife. She will have to decide on all medical
problems, help all the sister missionaries, be very involved with the mission
by traveling all over with her husband plus have to give talks at every
specialized meeting. I’m sure tho’ that
they will both do well.
Dad didn’t tell
you that we are being released on the 24th of March and need to be
out of here on the 26th which is the mission transfers date. They are going to move another set of Elders
into Paragould so even though they won’t be living in this apartment they will
need our furniture and what ever else that belongs to the mission. This will allow us to do more then we thought
we would have time for. We were going to
start packing, which I have already started to do but now it will be more in
earnest. Dad keeps saying that we still
have a month but I really don’t like being in a rush to pack up. I have seen to many missionary apartments
where all kinds of things have been left behind and the departed missionary
wants what was left behind.
We will have the
Sisters again this week, so far we can’t take them anywhere but since it will
be getting up to the 60’s at the end of the week the roads will clear out and
we will be going to all of their appointments and waiting or we should plan
better and go and do our own things while they are doing theirs.
Judy will be
getting baptized Sun. so that is still on.
We aren’t done reading The Book of Mormon with her but if we read more
then six chapters and if we can get her to do more reading on her own then we
will be done before she is baptized. She
has had all of the lessons in kind of a sideways way. She did not like cut out figures or
illustrations that missionaries like to do.
We have already gone through the questions that will be asked at her
interview, so we are hoping that we have her as prepared as we can.
We were invited
to go to a MidSouth Farm Credit dinner by the director that is here in
Paragould. We obviously couldn’t vote
but we did enjoy the meeting from a southerners point of view. We were introduced to the CEO of the bank in
this area and to many other farmers. We
were also introduced to a lady that works for Farm Credit that is LDS she was
so excited to be able to talk to someone who belonged to the same church. It didn’t take long for us to talk about church
things and I noticed that everyone around us just melted away. They gave us a weather warning device. At
first we never heard an alarm but a couple of mornings ago at 4:30 in the
morning the alarm started to buzz and yes it is loud enough to wake up the
dead. It was telling us that a massive
winter storm was on it’s way. Most of
the afternoon and evening yesterday the alarm kept going off giving us updates
on weather and road conditions. So it’s
almost tempting to leave it here but who knows maybe we can use it some other
time.
Dad is downstairs
trying to get the car to move so he can go and get a shovel to get rid of
3inches of ice on the steps and walk way.
Then maybe we can get the missionaries out of the apartment. They have been playing games for most of the
afternoon and one of us have to be here to chaperon them.
Well my
dears I need to close. I have clothes to fold up and as soon as the
missionaries leave I will clean the floor.
They keep talking about not cleaning or doing their laundry so what do
they do?
Love to all We will see you soon
Mom and Dad, Grammy and Papa, Elder and Sister Hansen
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