marking time

Ever since we arrived in the mission, we have told the missionaries that they can call Presidente any time they need to or want to with the exception of Friday night. They can call on Friday night, but it has to be an emergency. What usually happens on Friday night is that someone calls and then Presidente calls the assistants and tells them to call whoever he received the call from. Then, the assistants call those missionaries and then call us back and tell us that it wasn’t an emergency, the missionaries just forgot that it was Friday night.

In the mission, the days of the week run like this:

Sunday

P-day Day

Work Day

Work Day

Work Day

Work Day

Baptism Day/Work Day

In other words, they all seem quite similar. Keeping track of time for us North Americans has the added challenge that we have no visual clues, not only of what day it is, but also what month it is. Spring is here, and I am constantly reminding myself that it is October.

Because timing is important, we have some aides to help us. One of the most interesting tools is called the Rainbow Chart.

I had to go back a ways to find one that I could share. For all the obvious reasons, the current chart is confidential. I will say that we have had to update the current chart several times already this month…which makes us very happy!

You will probably have already figured out why we call it the Rainbow Chart. We keep the missionaries color-coded to help us with planning for apartments and companions. We also have some notations that tells us where they are going to have their training experience and where they are from, which helps us when choosing trainers. The top half of the chart shows the leavers and the bottom half of the chart shows the arrivals…well…who is Supposed to arrive. I am looking at this one and noticing that we have quite a few in the arrival sections of this chart that have since moved over to the waiter section.

If everything works out, we have our Latin elderes for 17 transfers and the North American elders for 16. We have the Latin hermanas for 13 transfers and the North American sisters for 12. Presidente and I are coming up on transfer 21. What an interesting and exciting time to be missionaries. With all of the missionaries called to the Buenos Aires West Mission, and in reality, the whole worldwide church, we are marking our time by stepping up the Work of Salvation.