Today Hna. Johnson took down the Christmas decorations in the office, boxed it and put it all in storage. She is on a roll when it comes to packing up and putting things away. This afternoon she stayed home after lunch and continued to pack up everything in our apartment. There are a lot of items that we inherited from the Larson’s, the Senior couple before us. Hna. Johnson is boxing everything for the new couple coming to take our place. All of the boxes of supplies we are saving for them will be stored in the mission office until the new couple gets here on the first of April.
Elder Barquero and Elder Huey, the office Elders we’re training to take our place, have been preparing all of the materials and documents for “Traslado” (Transfer Day) coming up in two weeks. One of the jobs that takes a lot of time is preparing the mission picture roster. The departing missionaries have to be removed and the arriving missionaries have to be added in. All of the pictures have to be prepped, shuffled, alphabetized and reassembled on the picture roster. I showed Elder Barquero what to do and he spent the better part of the afternoon working on it. He still isn’t finished.
Elder Barquero called me over to show me the old mission picture roster he was working on. He had prepped the page by drawing a big red X across the face of each departing missionaries. He wanted to show me the pictures of Hna. Johnson and I with the red X’s across our faces. I was shocked at seeing it. The sight of those X’s crushed me like a steamroller. Hna. Johnson and I are being taken off of the mission picture roster.
I’ve been prepping the mission picture roster for the past year and a half and it didn’t bother me a bit to draw an X across the face of the departing missionaries. This time it was my own pictures being X’ed out, wow what a difference. It is still hard to believe that our mission to the Dominican Republic Santo Domingo West mission will be over in just 3 weeks.
New Years at midnight is celebrated in the DR exactly like the US. Tonight I worked late on picture captions for the Blog well past midnight. As early as 11:00pm fireworks were going off in our neighborhood. By midnight the fireworks and gun shots were non-stopped and deafening. The whole capital sounded like a war zone.
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