All My Bags Are Packed; I’m Ready to Go!

Well, here we are, almost ready to leave the United States for a year and a half. Even though we’ve prayed and planned for this moment, it still seems a little unreal to me. Saying good-by to all that is most dear to us: our children and their spouses and our grandchildren, our extended family members, friends, and our home in Fruitland, was not easy. Surprisingly, leaving our home was as gut wrenching as anything on the list of ‘hard things I’ve done lately’. Leaving these little people tops the list though!

Grandkids Thanksgiving 2013

I thought I would give a brief overview of the basics of the program we will be working in, the self-reliance program . It is not a welfare program; it is not a program to help members in temporarily difficult circumstances; it’s objective is long term self-reliance. Our church has a vast welfare program, but the self-reliance program we are working in is much broader than that. Self-reliance is not a temporary fix; it’s teaching self-reliance as a way of life. The President of our Church, Thomas S. Monson, has taught that self-reliance is “the ability, commitment, and effort to provide the necessities of life for self and family”. Self-reliance involves several areas of a balanced life, including (1) education, (2) health, (3) employment, (4) family home production and storage, (5) family finances, and (6) spiritual strength. Our daily activities, once we get the office in Sydney started, will involve teaching classes and making people aware of the programs we offer. The program has many facets, too many to go into detail in this first post.

We began our training a few weeks ago with a three-day workshop specifically geared to learning about the Perpetual Education Fund (PEF) and self-reliance program itself. As I said earlier, the program is not humanitarian (helping) it is a program geared to solving poverty, in other words, teaching people to lift themselves out of poverty. Many programs that deal with poverty today try to solve the poverty problem in two ways: either by sending money, or encouraging people to immigrate. Our church though, has established a teaching plan to help people in the country where they are living. It works to dispel the practice of entitlement and seeks to replace it with effort on the part of the recipient. I will explain the processes in more depth in future posts.

Referring to the devastation of extreme poverty, Mahatma Gandhi said, “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” To help put that in perspective, currently: 80% of the people in the world today live on less than $10 a day, 5% live on less than $2.50 a day, 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, 3 billion live in mud huts, 250 million children are forced to work daily, 50,000 people die daily from poverty (30,000 are children). To put that number in perspective, the total number of US casualties in Vietnam for the entire war was just over 50,000. Obviously, the above numbers refer to third-world countries. Australia, where we will be, is not a third-world country, but it does contain many refugees from third-world countries. Our work will be with these people and those who, like in America, don’t have the skills, education, or drive to improve their lives.

We spent all of last week in the same religious training that the young men and young women going on proselyting missions for our church do. For my friends who are not members of the LDS church, I should explain that Dave and I have been ‘set apart’ as missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In reference to the term ‘set apart’, a prophet of our church, Spencer W. Kimball, defined it accordingly: “taken literally; it is a setting apart from sin, apart from the carnal, apart from everything which is crude, low, vicious, cheap or vulgar; it is to be set apart from the world to a higher plane of thought.” Along this same line, missionaries in our church are generally not referred to by their first names once they are set apart as full-time missionaries. Last names are used with the title ‘Sister’ for females and ‘Elder’ for males. The title Elder refers, in part, to the Priesthood duty to “teach, expound, exhort, baptize, and watch over the church.” (D&C 20). From now on, I will refer to my husband as ‘Elder Smith’ because that’s who he will be known as to others for the time we serve in Australia.

One-half of the 123 missionaries leaving the week we leave

Our training in the MTC was outstanding. I learned much and met many wonderful older couples who, like us, are headed out to serve others throughout the world. Our group was 123 people, mostly couples, training for service in: humanitarian services, church education for high school and college age youth, member reactivation and part-member family activation, working in mission offices as secretaries etc, and the ITEP program. ITEP stands for International Teacher Education Program (someday I want to do this one). Interestingly, in Samoa and Fiji, if you would like to be a teacher, you can just buy a teaching license. You don’t have to have any college or even any teaching courses; if you have enough money to buy the license, you’re good to go! The LDS church has elementary through high school church owned schools on these islands and the purpose of the ITEP program is to get all the teachers fully accredited. Working with BYU Hawaii, these missionaries will serve as adjunct professors to teach and oversee certification classes for these teachers.

The small group we trained with.  These people are going to
Cape Verde, London,  Samoa, and Australia

  It was overwhelming to see the global coverage of the senior missionaries, all 60 couples and three single sisters. It was even more impressive to see the 1,700 young sisters and elders in the MTC preparing to serve all over the world. The number and diversity of languages being taught to these young people is mind-boggling. These young missionaries will all serve as ambassadors of Christ and the message they share of the restored gospel and the atonement of Jesus Christ can do much toward instilling peace in the world. In part, the message we all will share no matter what ‘type’ of mission we serve is that: “Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities” The Family: A Proclamation to The World.

Elder Smith and I are excited to get going on our assignment in Australia. We are still waiting on our visas, hopefully though, we will be able to leave this week for training in New Zealand specific to our program, then move on to Australia to set up the PEF/Self-reliance in Sydney in two or three weeks. We are waiting for an OK from the Australian Embassy, but should know in a day or two. Here’s hoping…!!