Reflection

Well this is coming in a little late, anyone reading this should know I am writing this about a month after the fact. So I think this is going to sound more like a reflective diary piece, which should be a nice change of pace to the whole “another week in paradise” schpeal. Well we’re talking about February, maybe January. Jokes start coming in about the whole corona virus, the mission presidents wife is sending us memes. And here we start. In the middle of all of this, President decides I am ready to be the Senior AP. I had been junior AP for one change and President decided it was time for me to train a new guy. So there we are, Elder Foster and I are out here, clueless because I’m supposed to be the senior comp of the mission but I never know anything. And we are just blowing off the corona virus jokes as some phase joke thing from China. Really wasn’t even a concern. But it starts spreading. And I started getting worried. My last weeks on the mission were without a doubt the weirdest, hardest, most educational, and spiritual times of my life. I remember getting put on quarantine. The national panic that entered slowly in the ward and community.  I remember going out to buy kiddie swimming pools because they shut down the baptismal fonts and we had to have something. Teaching lessons over the phone, doing a whole bunch of facetime interviews because we had to do all the the interviews for the whole mission. It was rough. I would check the church newsroom page daily and beg God for a way to be ok with what was happening. Quarentine wasn’t so bad. I learned to cook eggs and stuff, wrote a great original cover song to Bare necessities by Mowgli and Co. It was something. We got locked on our balcony and everything. But I remember one day just breaking down and sobbing because I knew we were coming home. Next day we go to the office to start coordinating stuff and we get the call from president. Official. Then we get put on a country wide lockdown, jailtime if youre outside. But this is the crazy part, we had just designed an extremely complicated bus route in 2 parts circling the entire eastern and central parts of the country, moving and joining a few groups of missionaries to prepare for the great escape. So we got this crazy, brain bursting logistical nightmare going on and then 1, President notifies us officially we will all be going home, and 2, the president of the republic shuts down all the streets. Long story short, we prayed and fasted and they got through checkpoints and even tho they had to stop and pay a gang some fees in front of one of the houses and do a midnight run, everyone got to a house safe. Also we had a baptism the next day but no water to fill our kiddie pool baptismal font. Your boy was losing it with the stress and non stop phone calls, but we clung to hope for the baptism of Carlos. So we prayed for rain and boom as soon as we start the fast rain comes down for the first time in 6 months. Just to clue you in, the baptism didn’t happen. Which was a very tough situation but we weren’t out of the water yet. Due to the shutdown, we couldn’t get home from the office. So we stayed with the secretaries. We managed to make arrangments and get someone to pack and smuggle us our bags a few days later but I never saw our house again and we lived a fat minute in the secretaries house with just the clothes on our back. Then the fun stuff started. The next week and a half we waited by the phone as we received updates and forms and requests from governments to get everyone home. We didn’t sleep till 2 or 3 every night. We filled out forms and brought a computer from the office to the secretaries house to do work without  internet. Ended up making forms to give buses permission to travel. The forms had my signature and were very suspect but got buses through. We did trips and movements and all kinds of mumbo jumbo (excuse the language) to get it all lined up. All in all I think it was like 2 weeks of quarantine. And full crisis mode. I can’t and honestly wouldn’t even want to explain every detail but after a few fallen through flights the gringos got on board Sunday. We had to work out everything from police details to bags to passports to clearance permissions and yeah. Wack. But God came thru. You can read my feelings about getting released in another entry just know that this whole thing taught me a lot. We had to go home. But we saw miracles and blessings and growth. I am not a big fan of Corona Virus but in the time we had reflecting on all this I realized what I wanna study, what I had loved about my mission, what I had learned in 20 months, I gotta spend time with my family, and help them move houses. Things worked out. And things always will.