Finally I got back to sleep, so when I woke up Monday morning I was feeling better than I deserved to. It would be our first day in the mission office, and we headed out about 10:30am. Right before that, I walked to the Chinese store to buy the shower rods and curtains to construct another of my (now mission-famous) shower surrounds in a new apartment nearby here on Tuesday. The first one, in Rome 1, is still holding up great after six months.
When we got to the office, which is only about 10 minutes from our apartment, it was happily chaotic. Eleven missionaries are heading home this week after completing their mission, and this P-day is when they show up in Rome to finish paperwork and have a final dinner at the mission home before flying out on Tuesday morning. So there were a bunch of long-time missionaries around, doing paperwork and enjoying being together. They would head out together for a final day of sightseeing around Rome; their group started two years ago in the Provo MTC, so they are good friends. I was able to help Anziano Wright, our first district leader here in Rome 3, convert a video he had made from .mov format to . mp4 so he could post it on Facebook before going home.
It turned out that somebody in the church travel department had booked some of them on Alitalia flights to the US, codeshared with Delta, probably to save a few dollars on airfare. Unfortunately, Alitalia has an 8kg (18 pound) limit on carry-on luggage, with a several hundred dollar penalty for going overweight! The problem is that these missionaries have two years' worth of stuff, so they would all have been overweight, which would have been very expensive, offsetting any small airfare savings. Fortunately the church has a 24-hour emergency travel department phone number, so Sorella Knies got busy and had them re-book everyone in such a way as to not incur those overages. Dee got to print everyone's boarding pass, which meant that she had to log onto Delta and enter all the passport details, so that took a while.
Meanwhile, there were several tech issues that I helped out with. In addition, the electrical system in the office can barely handle the AC units they have, so it kept tripping off. Apparently they are used to it, so they all know where the circuit breaker is. However, the power to the entire office then went out, which was not a circuit breaker issue, as it came back on after a few minutes. The computers that were all running Outlook had a problem reconnecting, which required calling global tech support. I recommended that they buy UPS (uninterruptible power supplies, basically a big battery) for each computer to give them a chance to do an ordered shutdown when a power outage occurs.
In the afternoon, I went home to meet with Claudio to build his new computer. They don't have AC at home, and this was closer for both of us. Unfortunately, his CPU cooler part didn't arrive from Amazon until after 3pm, which was too late for me. We needed to get to the mission home by 4:30pm to help prepare for the big evening dinner, which starts at 5pm (very early by Italian standards) because of everything going on in the evening. It turns out that the cooler that Claudio bought was not compatible with his CPU. He had showed me one, which I said was good, but then he bought another one at the last minute. So it's a good thing it didn't arrive, or we would have wasted a bunch of time. He ordered a different model, which hopefully will arrive Tuesday.
The dinner for departing missionaries was nice. We got to see a bunch of them whom we have come to know and admire, including several who are not departing but came to say goodbye: our two Roma 3 Sorelle, Nelson and Harmon were among those. Sorella Nelson has been with us for six months and thus will likely be transferred.
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| Whitings with Sorelle Nelson and Harmon |
We were the kitchen help, along with the Balzottis and the APs (Assistants to the President, two young missionaries who work closely with the President). The APs did all the serving, with the two senior couples in the kitchen filling the plates and doing the dishes. They had salad, bread, lasagna (from Metro), and gelato with cookies. Metro's strawberry gelato is so good! It was fun to be a part of the festivities. Here is a photo of the kitchen at the mission home, where they even have a dishwasher, almost unknown in Italy.
After the testimonies, the departing missionaries headed out to the temple site to get a final group photo. They also took a photo on the steps, and recreated their arrangement from their arrival picture, which was clever. We finished cleaning up the kitchen and then headed home. At that point the President and the APs sprang into action, calling all the Zone Leaders throughout the mission to let them know what the transfers would be for this week. The ZLs would then spread the word to the district leaders. Everyone learns about their new assignments on Monday night, and then they all transfer on Thursday. It is an emotional and exciting time for them, as they love the people they have worked with but they get to go see and love someplace new. Tuesday morning the mission vans head to the airport to drop off the departing missionaries and pick up a newly-arrived group from the US, who get two days of training before leaving on Thursday for their new cities.
Our Ganziano Papritz, whom we all expected to get transferred after the typical tenure of two transfers at the Institute, will stay another transfer! He is a wonderful, very hard-working missionary, so we are delighted. His companion, Ganziano Lewis, is also terrific, and is staying! Our daughter had asked about the unit of time "the transfer", which is how everything is measured on a mission. There is a new transfer every six weeks, so missionaries talk about how long they have been out in transfers, not in months. When we do our chair stacking event at district meeting (like last Thursday), the number we hold up is not the number of times we have been transferred, but how long we have been our our missions in transfer units.
I took my other African takeout meal to the mission office for lunch. It was called Egusi soup and is NOT a favorite. I will never eat it again. The taste and smell did not sit well with me. But the "swallow", which is a big ball of cooked flour, was good...
In a rare quiet moment, Anziano Balzotti asked me to help him find his Italian records on FamilySearch. When I showed him, he started writing notes so he would be able to replicate it. Instead, I began making him a document with screenshots and arrows. I'm a big fan of Snagit and highly recommend it. Anyway, he was surprised at what I was doing, and happy to have the document.
For some reason, I'm having trouble with my allergies. I think I may be allergic to peaches, which I have been eating a couple of times a day. That's sad.