This morning I was off to my usual “Diligencias” (Errands). My first stop was at the “Aduana” (Customs Office) where I picked up 8 packages for our missionaries. Next went to the “Tienda del Templo” (Temple Distribution Center) to fill orders for missionaries.
As I drove down the “Malecon” (coast road) the ocean was particularly rough today. It was very windy and I’ve never seen waves so big crashing into the coastline before. It was quite a spectacle.
Elder and Hna. Whitaker are the Office couple in the Santo Domingo East Mission. Their hobby is collecting seashells and mounting them around the frames of church pictures. The missionaries in their mission give the pictures to their investigators as gifts on their baptism day. The pictures are very inexpensive to create and the investigators love to receive them.
The Whitakers only have 7 months left of their 3 years left. (They’ve extended their 18 month mission twice and turned it into a 36 month mission!) They want to carry on their tradition of making church pictures framed with seashells when they get home to Utah. They estimate they have close to a ton of seashells they will be sending home. (Yes, I said a ton, that’s 2000 pounds!)
This afternoon I spent several hours with Elder Whitaker. We have been trying to find cheaper ways to ship large quantities of freight to the US by cargo ship, not plane. This afternoon we followed up on a lead of a shipping company that advertizes a cheap rate by way of a “Slow boat to China”. We found their office this afternoon and hopefully things will work out so the Whitakers can ship large quantities of seashells home.
Hna. Johnson and I are interested in the shipping company too but we have far less to ship. We have some seashells but we have a lot of gifts and other personal items that will be too heavy for our luggage when we go home in the middle of January.
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