Our Weekly Routine

Several have asked what our typical week is like. In short, we don’t have a “typical week”! Every day and every week is so very different and we have learned we need to be very “fluid” because things suddenly come up and change…constantly! Elder Nelson laughs and has mentioned about a saying he learned while serving in the US Navy…”Be fluid…flexible is too rigid!” But we can honestly say, we LOVE, LOVE all the amazing things that keep us busy each day!

What has been fun is that we get to serve others in lots of different ways and almost every day we seem to stay busy with lots of different things!

One consistent part of Elder Nelson’s primary responsibilities is to review missionary applications from prospective missionaries from Australia and Papua New Guinea, young men and young women who are wanting to serve either full-time missions or service missions. Elder Nelson reviews their medical history, summarizes it, and then types up his recommendations. I get to help him with this process, and I enjoy it! It takes about 45 minutes to an hour for each missionary application, and he receives anywhere from one to five (or more) applications per day.

Starting on Monday, August 11th, we are going to be trained in an eight-lesson mental health/emotional literacy course over the next eight weeks. Once we are trained, we will then teach this course to our missionaries in two nearby zones in a group setting in their weekly District Council Meetings. I’m sure that will keep us very busy, but it is so needed!

Elder Nelson stays very busy working with the seven missions of Australia and Papua New Guinea, advising and helping the mission leaders with all the various medical situations that occur in their missions.

Part of our assignment is to tour different hospitals and dental offices to see their facilities, as well as meet with doctors and other providers to establish good relationships and ensure quality medical and dental care for our missionaries. As part of this responsibility, we are privileged to be able to travel throughout Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Two weeks after we had arrived in Brisbane, our home base, we flew to Papua New Guinea on June 12th, and Elder Nelson and I were able to meet Elder and Sister Colledge. They are currently serving in PNG as Mission Health Adviser and assistant, and were our hosts for a week. Together, we worked for hours performing physicals on Saturday June 14th. Over 400 young men and young women in Papua New Guinea are hoping to serve missions and one of the limiting factors is getting a physical examination.

Healthcare in PNG is very primitive by our standards and is very difficult to obtain. I was tasked with using the blood pressure cuff. It was a lot of fun for me to measure their blood pressure and their pulse.

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After I had finished, I looked over and noticed that several little children were gathering around me, hoping they could also have this “cool gadget” put on their wrist for a few seconds. I had a great time with the blood pressure cuff and about ten little children having a fun time getting to use the cuff for the first time.

In July, we were able to travel to Melbourne with the Area Mental Health Adviser, Sister Keil and her husband. Sister Keil presented some training to the new mission leaders, The Andersons, on the eight-week program that helps with mental health management. This is the same eight-week mental health/emotional literacy course that we will be trained in. While in Melbourne, we attended two Zone Conferences which were wonderful and also were able to see a “Penguin Parade,” which was magical to watch! We’ll post further about that. While in Melbourne, Elder Nelson was kept very busy helping medically on several Zoom calls with situations in the other missions.

On August 15th, we will travel to Adelaide, probably Perth in October and in November we travel to Sydney. We are excited about these upcoming trips.

To give you an example of how Elder Nelson helps medically, a young Elder missionary tripped and broke off his two front teeth and needed to be seen right away by a dentist. Elder Nelson had to make all the arrangements for that missionary to be seen. This is just one example of many dozens that we have helped with.

We actually spend quite a bit of time in various Zoom meetings and calls. We have occasional meetings with the Area Presidency, with Mission Leaders, Mission Health Advisors, LDS Family Services, Mental Health Advisors, missionaries, occasionally parents of missionaries, insurance people, public health officials, other doctors and providers, and even with people at church headquarters in Salt Lake.

There are also lots and lots of emails, phone calls, and weekly reports to prepare. Never a dull moment!
We also help with Zone Conference lunches, missionary flat (apartment) inspections, flat repairs…lots of repairs and restocking flat items that are broken or missing. We kind of function as property managers for several flats and end up doing a lot of handyman tasks and repairs.

Last week Elder Nelson replaced a broken kitchen faucet with a new one and we also spent about three hours trying to find a replacement garage door opener that had fallen out of a missionary’s shirt pocket. We finally found the remote and actually had a tender mercy that instead of paying the $71 dollars to replace it with a new manufacturer opener, the lady said she just happened to have an after-market opener for that garage door, and it was only $20 dollars! Yay! We help advise and oversee a district of about twelve missionaries and attend their weekly District Council Meetings on Tuesdays.

We have also been asked to help teach some of the missionaries English, which will be a great benefit for them. We have missionaries from all over the world, and for many of them, English is a second language.

Between all of this, we try to exercise several times a week by either walking around Forest Lake, which is a beautiful lake about a mile from our home. Or we work out at home to a YouTube video where we march, kick, slide and pop up for a two mile workout. Haha. We also find moments to relax and have fun. One of our very favorite things to do is to ride Brisbane’s river “City Cat,” an inexpensive water catamaran taxi system that only costs .50 cents to ride down the hour long river cruise and then .50 cents to ride the hour back. We especially love riding the City Cat at night! The lit up view of Brisbane’s skyscrapers and her nine bridges that the City Cat goes under…especially the 85 year old Story Bridge and the Kangaroo Point Bridge, that are also lit up, it is just a gorgeous, breath taking scene! We could ride the City Cat a thousand times up and down the Brisbane River and it would never disappoint or grow old!

We also enjoy the Lone Pine Koala sanctuary and “Eat Street”, which is a huge collection of food “trucks” made out of old shipping containers. Every kind of food you can imagine, live music, and a really fun vibe!
We LOVE Brisbane, we LOVE the people here and love our mission, and feel so very blessed to be here serving our Savior, Jesus Christ!