Hola!

Our second week of virtual MTC training was a little more intense than the first. We logged into the “Zoom” video conferencing application at 8am each morning and finished at 5pm, with an hour break for lunch (although sometimes the morning sessions ran long!). We are formally called as mission “office specialists” and the focus of this second week at the MTC was office training.

There are typically four areas of responsibility in a mission office: mission secretary, financial secretary, housing, and vehicles. Since the Peru Lima North Mission doesn’t use cars or bicycles, we didn’t need to learn the “vehicle” information.  Although it sounds like our mission may also have technology and social media assignments, we didn’t receive any training in those areas.

Highlights:

Working with a new set of MTC trainers: Once again the MTC trainers were stellar young adults who were very knowledgeable and patient as they introduced us to the details of working in a mission office.

Learning IMOS: IMOS stands for Internet Missionary Office System and it is basically the “brain” of the mission. The way the system is set up is genius as we are able to log-in to a “practice” version of the Peru Lima North Mission’s actual IMOS, which is basically a copy of what was going on in Lima 2 weeks ago. This 2-week-old version of IMOS allowed us to enter data, assign new housing, make financial payments, and move around missionaries on the virtual transfer board without actually causing changes. This practicing is so helpful! Lane and I had some classes together and some separate. Lane focused on learning the financial responsibilities while I focused on the mission secretary and correspondence responsibilities, and we both learned about housing responsibilities.

Reconnecting with our mentors: In January, we were each assigned personal mentors who introduced us to IMOS (in meetings over Zoom) and began teaching us how the system works. Then, each day during our MTC training we would again “meet” individually with our mentors who would review what we had learned in the previous training session. They quizzed us by having us complete certain tasks – finding and modifying reports, making payments, writing correspondence, interacting with the transfer board, and the like. So, we didn’t just watch while the trainers and mentors demonstrated tasks, we had the opportunity to actually do things (in a virtual setting where we weren’t actually messing anything up!).

Watching a Lima stake conference: Corinne, Lane’s sister, sent us the Zoom link for a stake conference at which she and Meredith (President Packard) were speaking. It was so fun to see them speak – they radiated enthusiasm and joy – and even if I (LeAnn) didn’t understand everything, I was able to catch words and phrases here and there, and Lane translated the rest for me.

Thoughts:  Before beginning our studies each morning and afternoon, we took turns sharing an inspirational thought, and one sister in our district shared a thought from Steven Covey’s book, The Divine Center. We don’t have the book, so this isn’t a direct quote, but we loved the idea: All people have Christ-like potential. Divinely-centered people are always learning, curious, growing, humble, upbeat, and cheerful. They aren’t judgmental; they don’t carry grudges. They keep up on current affairs and are active in the community. They have a sense of humor, and learn from all good books. The 13^th Article of Faith aptly describes them: “We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul—We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.”

¡Tengan una buena semana! (Have a great week!)

Love,

Lane & LeAnn