My cold is actually doing quite a bit better: breathing without meds, not using much kleenex, but my energy is still a bit low and there was one afternoon application of cough syrup. Meanwhile my companion seems to be coming down with it (again?). Perhaps we need to get out of Utah to get healthy!
One
reader asked how we were able to obtain 18 months worth of prescriptions to
take with us. It's a good question, so here goes. We really liked the idea of not having to figure out how to find a doctor and fill prescriptions over there. For senior
missionaries serving abroad, the church offers a
very reasonably priced international health insurance policy from Aetna, which pays for up to one year's
worth of prescriptions before departing. Once the Aetna policy was in place (Aug 1 in our case), we asked our doctors to write one-year prescriptions and filled them via the Aetna card at our pharmacy of choice.
Our doctors didn't give us any hassle about that, since we had explained what
we were doing. Once we got one year's worth filled, we then asked our doctors to
submit another six month's worth of prescriptions to be paid for out of
pocket. Fortunately, Costco is really cheap for most prescriptions without
insurance -- I've learned that over the years because I have one
prescription not covered by insurance (it's about 10x cheaper at Costco than at CVS). Problem solved, fairly inexpensively. Note that this whole exercise wouldn't have been necessary if we were to serve in the US, as is true with a good portion of our mission preparations.
Today we spent the full day (8am - 3:30pm) in S&I training, talking about how to prepare lessons, make the classroom a welcoming and safe environment for our students, and even preparing and teaching a brief lesson from the scriptures to another couple. It's stuff we mostly know, but it's always good to get fresh ideas from other teachers.
At the end of our class time, we had someone from church security talk to us for an hour about how to be safe as missionaries. They covered lots of different topics, and we got some good pointers out of it.
Tonight was the weekly MTC devotional with a General Authority of the church. They don't announce ahead of time who it will be, but tonight it was Elder Quentin L. Cook, one of the twelve apostles of our church, and his wife -- kind of a big deal for us Mormons. He told several touching/funny stories about his mission companions in England in the early 1960s, then he challenged the missionaries to love their companions, the people, their mission president, and the Lord. At the end he bore a very strong testimony of the fact that Jesus Christ lives today. It was a spiritual feast.