The phone call

For the Christmas call we used a speaker phone for everyone to listen to Brad on and then the one who was talking used an extension phone in another room. We found it made it much easier to hear and understand each other. So this Mother's day call we were planning the same......
Well, Saturday night I was finishing the last things for my sunbeam lesson and needed some Word of Wisdom visual aids....I usually finish up my lesson on Sunday morning before church... (First Prompting....) (we keep all the FHE stuff, pics and such in Spencer's office) so I went down stairs to get them and..... His office was locked. AND we DON"T have a key!!! Mind you this is about 9:30 p.m. Well this wouldn't be such a big deal but the speaker phone is in there too and Brad was calling in the morning at 7:00 "blink blink" a.m. YIKES!!!

So first we try taking the hinges off the door to take it off that way.....Nope that doesn't work so NEXT we try to use knives to push back the latch....NOPE that doesn't work, then we try drilling the lock out..... after 20 minutes or so of doing that whew! we get it opened!

So Sunday morning we get up and wait....and wait.... and wait.... 7:45 comes along and still no call. He was supposed to call us and give us his number and then we would call back. Well...Spencer decided to just clean up his email while we were waiting (Second prompting.....) because as he was looking, there were 3 emails in his inbox that were from someone we didn't know but the subject was "Mother's day call" It was from the Suttons in the mission office. The missionaries were having problems with the international codes and cards and they couldn't get thru so they had emailed us Brad's phone number so we could call him.

So Spencer quickly dials up his number and he hears... "Hello this is Elder Kendall..." Oh what a joyful sound! Gosh you seriously don't realize how much you miss them till you hear their voice! They had just been at a tiny pay phone about 10 minutes away from their apartment trying to call us and couldn't get thru so they had just started to walk back home....

We got to talk to him for around 40 minutes or so and then he had to leave for a dinner appointment....(What? you want to eat dinner over talking to your family?!!!!) But he said it would be ok for us to call him back after we got home from church and talk some more. We went to church and then came home and called again.... busy....again....busy....again...busy repeated a few times. Finally about 45 minutes later we got thru and he had been on the phone reporting their numbers to the AP's... But we got to talk for another while with him. So here are a few interesting things we learned...

They have about 124 missionaries in his mission now. When he came there were only about 70 or so.

There are only about 20 missionaries who are older than he is... all the rest (100 or so) are younger...and he has only been out about 10 months so yes, their mission is VERY young!

He said that people over there work in the factory for 12 hours a day and they earn $1.00

An elementary type teacher earns maybe $100.00 per month.

The kids find garbage bags, wad them up into tight balls and then find something to wrap around it like a string or rubber band type thing and that is what they use for a ball to play with.

Their mission goal is to have 1 baptism per week per companionship. And they are doing it!

Death over there is pretty common so when someone dies, it isn't as traumatic as it is here. Last week they baptized two families and both father's had died.

The thing he misses most is food.... ha ha that really made me laugh! They live by the US embassy and the man who was there just left to come home so he gave the missionaries all his food and they were ecstatic! they had some brownie mixes, mac and cheese, spaghetti sauce, two cases of green beans and loads more. They were in heaven!

When it came time to say good bye, it was really hard to hang up. But we did it and the countdown starts till our next call at Christmas! :)

He is growing so much. You can just hear it in his voice how much he loves serving our Savior and doing the work. He says he is tired all the time but it's a good tired.

Shannon gave me this little plaque that says "Missionary... Someone who leaves their family for two years so that others may be with their families for Eternity" Yup, that is what it is all about. I wouldn't want him to be anywhere else!