Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Hello everyone!

Yes, you could say I'm "hangin´in here" in the office. There is so much to do, and all of it is urgent, so we've been spending a lot of long, long days in here trying to get it all done. We've made steps towards eating more regularly (though it's still not what you'd call "regular") and I exercised and had my personal study in the morning for the first time today in several weeks. I hope that things begin to stabilize soon. But stabilized or not, we've been getting a lot of work done here.

I've greatly enjoyed working with President Watkins and all of the people in the office as well. President Watkins truly is a man with a visio
n and I enjoy helping put those visions into action as the secretary. I'm learning my duties bit by bit, focusing on the most urgent things (residency) and slowly picking up on all the other little things that I need to do. The nature of the work in the mission office is that I try to do my normal work and constantly get interrupted by various emergencies. Before I started working here, I never understood all of the responsibility that the office elders have. I'm learning a lot about how to work under pressure and get things done.

I'm glad to hear about how all of my beloved siblings are doing. It sounds like everyone's happy and healthy.


Well, unfortunately, we don't have much time today. Once again, the office has invaded my preparation day and we'll be running some errands, all of them of course "urgent." It's all we can do to keep the mission from exploding, but we're learning our duties, despite our inexperience and lack of training. I continue to miss being able to doing normal missionary work like I used to, but I know that this is an important assignment and, until I can get things down to a manageable level, I've got to devote all of my time and effort to this.

Sorry I don't have the typical "missionary experience" stories this week. The only stories I have have to do with working until 11:00 in the office trying to arrange emergency flights, re-making the mission phone list 5 times, fixing the network connection so that we can print, unjamming the printer, getting 8 missionaries registered in their local city halls, combining the residency data from the old Bilbao missions, the Canaries and the old Madrid mission, making and sending out announcements, keeping up with references, compiling spreadsheets, etc., etc., etc.. So, not your typical "missionary work," but the mission would explode if nobody did it.

To make up for my boringness, I decided to send some pictures in this email. Enjoy! I love you all so much.

-Elder Knorr