We spent 2 days this week in Salt Lake being trained for our upcoming mission in the Area Office in Central Europe.  This board shows the couples like us all around the world who are doing this job.  We’ve now learned more about exactly what that job entails and we are really excited.  Lyle and Cricket Parry led this training and they brought in several specialists to help prepare us for our assignment.

Here’s our agenda and a listing of the things we learned:

To put things simply, these are the purposes of our communication job:

We learned about writing press releases and news articles.  We learned about meeting with government and civic officials and building relationships.  We learned how to use the software that will help us keep track of our work.  We learned about using social media and photography and release forms.  We learned how the communication departments are organized and who does what where.  We learned about legal issues and how to take care that we are representatives of Jesus Christ at all times.  We learned a lot of other things too that will be important in our work.

Here is an interesting visual of how internet use has grown and spread in the world.  Much of our work will be using social media to share our message of goodness and hope.

We served with the Parrys in West Africa.  They were the communication couple in Accra while we were in Abidjan and Bamako.  We love being with them.

Work on the Salt Lake Temple continues.  The Joseph Smith Building where we met is also being renovated.  The center of Salt Lake is one big construction zone right now.

We are really happy and really excited to get going.  This mission will be very different from missions I’ve served:  Proselyting in South Africa,  Humanitarian work in Nigeria, Mission Leaders in Yakima, Member Leader Support in West Africa.  We are both excited to learn to do new things in Europe.  We leave in a week!