Tech Support on Christmas Eve

Sunday was Christmas Eve. We had only one hour of church at 11am, a bit later than usual. The eight missionaries (four young, four senior) in our district were asked to sing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" -- in English! -- so we went a bit early to practice. Half of us were singing harmony and half melody, with me holding down the bass part. Anziano McConkie, who is a performing arts major and has a gorgeous tenor voice, sang "Silent Night" in Italian as a solo. After a program telling the Christmas story with scriptures, narration, and music, Bishop Perego gave a wonderful talk about the gifts we can give to the Savior, showing samples (fake, I assume :) of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that he undoubtedly uses effectively in teaching Seminary and Institute classes. He said that the best gift we can give is to obey the commandments, which bring happiness. There were a number of out-of-town visitors present, mostly family of our ward members, which made the day even better.  

I asked David Perego, age 13, what he thought he might get for Christmas, and his response was, "I don't really care. What I like is seeing other people get presents".  What a wonderful attitude. He has three younger siblings, so hopefully he can really enjoy that.

After church, I tried to help the Spragues with a gmail problem on their laptop. She had inadvertently removed a couple of accounts from their list of "linked" accounts, something I didn't even know you could do! Unfortunately, the internet at church is so slow that we couldn't get anything done. I told them to call me in afternoon from their apartment, where internet is decent, and I would help out via TeamViewer. They did, and I did, and we worked it all out pretty quickly. I also configured their myldsmail.net email accounts to forward to their personal gmail accounts; they were delighted to have one less place to go to check email. Their laptop is a few years old and has a dead battery, so I also offered to buy them a new battery on eBay, for under 30 euro; they were also delighted at that. Overall, being Santa GeekClaus is very rewarding!

The Hubers are an American couple in our ward. He works for the military in some capacity, so they have access to the commissary on the base near Naples, which is basically an American supermarket. Saturday they contacted us to see if we wanted anything from there, where there are many items which either aren't available here at all, or are very expensive. So of course we gave them a list we had been accumulating since they last did this for us a few months ago. After church they gave us a big shopping bag, filled with goodies which we were delighted to reimburse them for. Santa could not have done a better job! Among the loot: lotion kleenex (impossible to find here), a bottle of 100 acetaminophen tablets (you can buy maybe ten at at time here, for 10x the price), Crystal Light lemonade power (very expensive on amazon.it, apparently Italians don't do diet drinks much), Alka Seltzer, shortening, Hershey kisses, etc. Christmas definitely came to us on Sunday!

In the afternoon I caught up on some paperwork and bookkeeping, some personal and some for the Institute. The crazy and wonderful week had left me behind. My wife made some more of her wonderful chocolate/peanut butter cookies, and we dropped off a festive plate of them to our neighbors across the hall. There are four apartments on our floor, but only two of them are occupied, and they seem like a very nice family, with mom, dad, and a daughter who is perhaps 10 years old.

 

In the evening we went down to the Institute to let in our Sorelle (who live right below us), Ricks and Bryant, so they could put together a video collage of missionaries around the world singing Silent Night in different languages. After that, they wanted to do their semi-annual (Skype) call home, using the much better internet speeds there -- about 10x the speed of our home DSL connection. Unfortunately, the internet there was very flaky this time. We have a wireless ISP, and it's usually quite reliable but does occasionally go on the fritz. So they couldn't download the video clips they  needed, and they couldn't Skype. Thus, after a half an hour of trying, we finally just drove home. We needed to take some stuff to/from the Institute anyway, so the trip wasn't wasted.

At our apartment, we set them up to use Skype, one using my laptop (and our slow DSL internet) in our living room, and one using my the 10GB plan on the new 4G SIM card on my phone in the kitchen. Each one talked for about 40 minutes with their family, who had gathered for the event. We left them alone to do their visiting. It seemed to work well enough in both cases. In fact, as far I can tell, the phone only used 200MB of data for over 40 minutes of video Skype -- doesn't seem possible, but maybe they give some kind of free data usage on holidays (?). In any case, I'm not complaining. Monday at the ward Christmas feast I'll let some other missionaries there do the same, because the internet is so bad at church. Maybe I'll get to do some diagnosis of the problem as well, but we want these missionaries to have good experience with their families for Christmas, even if we have to pay for a bit of extra data on our SIM cards.

After the Skype call, we let the sisters do their video editing on my computer. It took almost and hour, requiring a bit of help from me using Nero to convert some of the video formats and to copy some videos from their tablet, because doing it over the internet here is prohibitively slow. At the end they had a fun little video to share with friends and fellow missionaries. They were very grateful for our help all evening, which made it all worthwhile. I didn't get good photos, but here they are at my desk:

 

I spoke with my sister Marilyn on the phone, and my wife spent some time trying to help her parents at home, which can often be frustrating because they have a knack for undoing whatever she sets up, inadvertently or not.

Overall, it was a lovely Christmas Eve. Our best wishes to all our readers for a Merry Christmas. It's the first time since we had children that we won't be with them in person during the holidays. We feel so blessed to be serving here and thinking more about others than ourselves, serving as Christ might do. May you all remember the reason for the season.