Portuguese Coach Museum
Navegadores
Another week, another email, and another bunch of ridiculous stories.
Before the stories, business:
GO BYU. As you can imagine, by the time Monday rolls around, everybody wants to know the scores, including me. The BYU-Utah rivalry is all the way over here in Portugal, too. I’m not one for rivalries, but I do have Elder Prince’s (he just left the office) U of U shirt, which I’m probably going to turn over to President Terry (Elder Prince thought he left it in the mission home, and President was supposed to be keeping an eye out for it… President is a diehard BYU fan, as he said while he introduced himself in our Lisbon zone meeting yesterday.) Apparently everybody also thinks I’m supposed to know what happens to Oregon and Oregon State.
Portuguese in the office. When Elder Stott got in here, he had just came up from the Algarve with a Brazilian companion, Elder De Lima, and they spoke Portuguese all the time. In the office though, I’m of the opinion that we go crazy enough as it is doing everything that we do. We have no agreement whatsoever to speak Portuguese during the day, but we slip it in when it isn’t something funny or something ridiculously important. “Vocês já apanharam o correio?” Etc. I don’t want to spend 6 months in the office learning Office Portuguese (the missionaries have their own dialect, like pronouncing Sexta Feira like Seixta Feira, and I do all that I can to avoid listening to other elders speak Portuguese, except Elder Stott, who speaks the best in the mission, according to all the Portuguese elders).
“Can you tell me what makes the office elders such a special group? What characteristics do they have that gives them the opportunity to serve in this special way?”
Oh, goodness. I think it comes down to responsibility. The people that are in the office right now are pretty responsible (in the past it was definitely not the case, and a lot of what we do is to clean up after the way they left everything). We recognize that there is nobody else but us to clean up after our mistakes, and we refuse to pass it on to future secretaries. The office has really shown me that consequences are really what motivate people, and that people will eventually settle into the path of least resistance. We in the office try to make it so that the path of least resistance is the right one. I think we’re all individually invested in how well we do our jobs because when our companion leaves, it’s up to us, and then we have to teach the next secretary. If we don’t do our jobs right, it’s a mess, and we recognize that.
Stories.
Friday and Saturday, I was on a division with Elder Gustafson, who came into the mission when I got into the office. I gave his financial training on his first day. It was my first time going on a division with somebody younger than me (in the mission, age is the time you have in the mission). It was really cool. It reignited a lot of the greenie attitudes I had coming into the mission, but it helped me see how I have the attitude I have. It’s not that I lost any naivety, but I’m just seeing the value in different places. It’s hard to judge success, and I still don’t think I understand how to measure my own success, but Preach My Gospel makes it clear that it’s based on personal commitment. Success is a hard thing to identify on a daily basis. Effort and use of common sense are probably the only ways I know of to satisfactorily measure success. But it’s fun to remember what it was like to be really new in the mission. I’m only in my fifth transfer, but a lot changes pretty quickly.
Monday. We had to help with visas, since Elder Hobbs is not allowed to drive. They had a huge group of 12 people. I drove people to the Loja do Cidadão in Restauradores, going from the office, past the Benfica stadium, over through Praça de Espanha, through Marques de Pombal (the huge roundabout), and down into Restauradores. Elder Croshaw and I were all over the place, going to the bank, getting stuff for zone conference, driving people from Restauradores in Lisbon over to the Finanças place in Linda-A-Velha (which I found by memory, having only been there once in my second transfer), dropping Elder Croshaw off for a division in Lapa (which was fortunate for Elder Croshaw because the former financial secretary was staying the night in our house because zone conference was the next day), and then picking people up from the Finanças place and taking them back to the office. It was a crazy busy day. I got back, did pedidos (material requests), ordered pizza, did bills, reimbursements, a bunch of stuff. It was a pretty normal day, but with a lot of driving.
I’m mostly out of time, and I forgot to talk about P-Day last week. We went to the Portuguese Coach Museum in Belém, which was really cool. I attached some pictures. We got Pasteis de Belém (ridiculously good Pasteis de Nata), and took a bunch of pictures for the Caravela. While we were eating lunch on some stairs between two cafés, two or three people stopped, stared, and then took pictures of us eating. Tourists. So many tourists.
I feel like I’m at work, except instead of getting off at 5 to go home or do whatever, I go upstairs, eat dinner, and then we go do missionary work, the real job. The longer I stay here as financial secretary, the more I see that it’s not about the money – and that is what makes it so hard.
Pay your tithing.
Abraços,
Elder Lobo
0 comments:
Post a Comment