A. Doing Office Work
Within the general perimeters of their assignments, senior
missionaries in the Mormon Church are prone to gravitate to doing that which is
most natural to them, either because they find the work most comfortable or
because it is closest to what they were trained to do before coming on their
missions. Church missions present a
broad array of service opportunities—from proselyting to office work, welfare
service to mission support, working with members to supporting local leaders. Those inclined to teaching can use their
talents to help out as substitute teachers in Sunday School, Relief Society, or
Priesthood, teaching English as a second language or helping local leaders with
missionary or temple preparation classes.
Those who are handy can easily spend time keeping the car fleet
operational, fixing leaky toilet and stubborn locks, hanging curtains. Missionaries accustomed to office work can
find their days consumed paying bills, dealing with landlords, preparing and
sending reports to the Area Office. And
those happy doing chores can find endless opportunities outfitting missionary
apartments, shuttling the car-less sisters grocery shopping, picking up
medicine and supplies for the elders and sisters. This leeway in choices exists because there
are so many ways in which the talents of senior missionaries can be deployed
and mission presidents rarely find it necessary or helpful to micro manage the
activities of senior missionaries, but instead prefer to give general directions,
leaving it to the inspiration of the senior missionaries to chart their own
courses.
However, having said this, each mission’s operation requires
a heavy dose of rather routine office work to keep things running
smoothly. Someone has to pay bills,
handle local finances, deal with banks, file reports with the Area Office,
secure care for sick missionaries, help with transport of young missionaries
needing rides. As a consequence, the
Mormon Church frequently calls a senior missionary couple to staff, on a
full-time basis, a mission office, located in the same town, and usually at the
same location, as the Mission Home, allowing easy coordination with the Mission
President and his wife, whose time would otherwise be consumed with necessary
but rather pedestrian administrative tasks.
The office challenges are even more taxing in foreign missions covering two
or more countries, or whose missionaries are widely dispersed, where it is
advisable to have several regional or national offices, in addition to the
Mission Office, to care of the multitude of administrative chores.[1]
These functions can be handled by
younger elders or sisters, but usually the Mormon Church understandably prefers
to allocate the responsibility to a senior couple specifically dedicated to
office work. The efficiency of having
the work handled by an older couple, working it on a full-time basis, rather
than through rotating sets of younger missionaries, is obvious.
The paperwork load is dramatically increased in foreign
missions, such as the Zambia Lusaka Mission, where missionaries move in and out
of several countries, generating an almost constant need for processing and
securing temporary stay permits and visas.
Some countries are more hospitable to foreign missionaries than
others. Recently, the Mormon Church has
found it difficult to get visas for missionaries assigned to work in South
Africa or to attend the Brazil Mission Training Center in route to Portuguese
speaking Mozambique. It is almost a
full-time job keeping track of passports, processing permits and visas,
interacting with employees in the Departments of Immigration, coordinating
travel plans.
A review of the Blantyre files reveals that many of these
tasks related to immigration status were handled in the past by the senior
office couple residing in Blantyre. Now
the Church has contracted out this function, to a large extent, to President
Chinyumba, the Blantyre District President, calling upon him to a seemingly
endless number of trips to the Malawi Department of Immigration and frequent
trips to the foreign embassies in Lilongwe.
President Chinyumba not only works on visas for the resident
missionaries, but also for local Malawians who are called to serve as
missionaries outside of Malawi. Hard
though this maybe to believe, over 20 Malawians have left in the last 12 months
to serve as full-time missionaries, most going to other African countries—South
Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe, Kenya—but one to the United States and two
to England. But even with this help,
there is plenty left to be done by the senior missionaries residing in Lilongwe
and Blantyre. It is challenging not to
let something fall in the cracks: the
passport for a Lilongwe missionary left in the Blantyre safe when it needs to
be in Lilongwe; forgetting to give $50 USD to a Western missionary traveling to
Zambia from Malawi to pay the required entry fee; yellow fever certificates
inexplicably getting separated from the other personal documents.
Moving documents at the last minute is a hassle,
inconvenient, stressful. Usually we try
to keep the missionary and his/her passport in the same city, held in a mission
safe for safekeeping. But the passports
for newly arrived missionaries in Malawi are usually held in Blantyre for a
while, even for the missionaries working in Lilongwe, allowing President
Chinyumba ready access to them as he renews the short 30-day stay permits and
gets the “TEPs” (temporary employment permits).
Occasionally, in the past, zone leaders or senior couples were, on short
notice, conscripted into making last-minute drives from Blantyre to Lilongwe,
or Lilongwe to Blantyre, to deliver passports to missionaries being transferred
or being called to Lusaka for special missionary training. While the 4 to 5 hour one-way drive is
beautiful and can be a pleasant break from the normal routine, it’s not quite
as beautiful when driving fast to accommodate a tight turnaround schedule, and
way too stressful when it entails night-time driving. Recently the Church has become comfortable
with a substitute solution, using the local AXA buses as a local courier
service. At the modest cost of 1,200
kwacha, close to $3 USD, a small package with passports can be sent either
direction, arriving in about five hours.
With two trips each day, this has dramatically reduced the stress of
moving documents within Malawi. The AXA
bus terminal is located in the center of Blantyre, at the end of a cul de sac,
just a five minute drive from our residence.
Though we did not expect to serve as an office couple, the
logistics of the mission has resulted in our taking on some office couple type
responsibilities for the missionaries residing Blantyre and for the local
church. When we arrived in the mission
field, Elder and Sister Reynolds were serving as the office couple for Blantyre
and housed the District’s distribution center—the site for purchasing garments,
Church DVDs, hymnals, scriptures—and the address for the delivery of all Church
mail directed to Malawi—Church magazines and CES (Church education system)
materials. The Mission needed us to
assume these responsibilities when they left to return to the United States
toward the end of March 2015. Quite
intentionally, Elder Reynolds screened us from the office functions early on, leaving
us free to get to know the members in the Zingwangwa Branch first before taking
on more assignments. Slowly he oriented us,
but even then he kept for himself the heavy lifting until the very end.[2] Only after they left did the full weight of
the office function fall to our shoulders.
It took me close to two months to reorganize the office to
my liking (I am sure the next office couple will reorganize once again the
office to their own taste) and to do at least once most of the routine tasks
(such as paying landlords, remitting required MRA taxes, picking up mail,
funding the Zone Leaders working capital, filing monthly reports with the Area
Office).
Originally it was my hope to confine the office function to
just a couple of hours in the morning each week day, so Carole and I could be
free by mid- to late- morning to devote to visiting families in the Zingwangwa
and Blantyre Second Branches. More than
Carole, I have found it hard to devote myself to the office work, though I
understand someone has to take on what are really quite significant burdens. And, by and large, I have tried to strike the
proper balance between keeping the office going and serving members by working
the office in the morning hours and keeping the afternoons free for member
visits.
Now, after several months of slogging along, a pattern is
slowly emerging. For the most part, I
can finish up the “paperwork” side of the office within an hour or two each
day; the key is staying current, especially with the payment and reporting of
the bills. However, there is an
inescapable randomness to the office work.
Without warning, “things” just crop up, many requiring immediate
attention—Sister Zohner needs to get to the hospital to be treated for a spider
bite; Elder Etiang from Uganda has a terrible tooth ache, needing a root canal
and crown; a package needs to be couriered to Lilongwe at the last minute; the
District needs an advance of 30,000 kwacha to fund the transport expenses to
bring the Liwonde members to the upcoming District Conference; the Isuzu truck
needing a new left hand side mirror is ready for pick up. While it might be nice to bunch these random
“to dos,” taking care of them in one fell sweep, they don’t line up in such a
tidy way. Often afternoons, mornings,
mid-day get chopped up, an hour here, an hour there, driving me a tad
crazy. To preserve a semblance of order,
we try to set aside each week several afternoons for visiting families--a
couple for Zingwangwa, a couple for Blantyre 2nd--usually leaving
Friday and the weekend open. Though I
wish more time were available for visits, the variety keeps us active and
engaged; I really don’t mind doing some of the office work;[3] the challenge is striking the right
balance. Carole can quickly sense when I
am getting too cranky, never a good sign.
Nothing restores my spirits as quickly as parking the Toyota at the
Chilobwe or Kampala market, walking hand in hand with Carole, visiting members
in their homes.
There are two significant advantages in working in the
mission office. The office couple gets
to know all of the younger missionaries, as they come in and out, getting new
assignments, being interviewed by the Mission President. Without exception, office couples speak with
great fondness about the younger missionaries, citing the experience as one of
the true highlights of the mission. The
second advantage is that the mission office is certainly the nerve center of
the mission. If one wants to know what’s
going on—where all the missionaries are located, the scuttlebutt about pending transfers,
the mission president’s schedule, visits of regional and area authorities—the
mission office is the place to be. And there
are some who really loved doing office work.
While some advantages grow out of working in the mission
office, at the end of the day, it requires an exceptionally self-sacrificing
couple to staff it. The Skidmores from
the Walnut Creek area in San Francisco worked in Lusaka as the office couple
when we arrived in the mission. They
were wonderful, easy to work with, and a great support to both the Mission
President and his wife, the younger missionaries and the senior couples. But, by its nature, office work is largely
anonymous, so it requires one to be committed, self-effacing, and
independent—one does not have the occasional compliment from local members to
buoy up one’s spirits. The work is done
in the back rooms, without much fanfare.
Yet, if it were not done, things just don’t work—schedules are fouled
up, missionaries are left stranded at airports, supplies are not delivered on
time, necessary visas are not issued.
When complaining about my limited office work, I have felt quite
sheepish, knowing how much behind the scenes work has been done, over the
years, by the Skidmores, the Reynolds, and all of the other office
couples. Carole and I feel extremely bad
about complaining once to the Skidmores about doing office work, when they
visited us shortly in Blantyre, just before returning to the United
States.
[1]
The mission office is in Lusaka, Zambia, while Malawi has two offices—one in
Blantyre, and a second in Lilongwe.
[2]
Roughly three months before the Reynolds’ departure, I started meeting with
Elder Reynolds once each week, usually for an hour or so on Friday mornings, to
start familiarizing myself with some of the office work—going to the bank,
visiting landlords, reviewing the financial reports—and getting to know the
peculiarities of the office couple residence at One Kufa Road. The process accelerated towards the end. Out of these visits, I prepared what I
grandly called the “Office Couple Handbook,” later sharing it with the Fisks in
Lilongwe, the Skidmores then the Mission office couple, and the Ericksons. It has proven to be a useful resource for
me. Frequently I refer to it to refresh
my memory. For example, when I needed to
start the generator for the first time, I found the notes in the Office Couple
Handbook sufficient to fire it up, otherwise Carole and I would have been
without power and lights for a while.
[3]
Some of you might be astounded to think of me taking care of office
functions. Over my career, I tried to
get great leverage using my secretary, word processors and other administrative
personnel, relying upon them heavily to support my legal practice. Vicki Lynn, my last secretary, who worked
with me for over ten years, was invaluable.
I delegated to her virtually every administrative task I could to free
up time for practicing law. As I
approached retirement, Carole was not hesitant about putting me on notice—she
was not going to replace Vicki Lynn—our marriage was not going to survive such
a dislocation in our relationship. I
would have to learn to fend for myself.
Once in the office, we managed to work out a simple enough allocation of
responsibilities—Carole handles the distribution center, fields health
questions from the younger missionaries, and does some of the interface with
landlords. I am left with bill paying,
financial accounting, dealing with the passports and money, and organizing the
office.
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