I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep

This has been a weird and also very busy week. From several peculiar occurrences at the beginning of the week, to the arrival of the greenies on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, the week was full of interesting experiences. In addition, we only saw president Robinson on Wednesday, because he was busy with interviews on Monday and the greenies came Wednesday (so he did not need to come into the office on Tuesday). On Sunday, we went to the Stigters after church to skype our families. We had a great time there, both talking to our families and spending a fun evening with the Stigters. When we got back to the office, the assistants and president had finished with transfers and we could get everything organised. We also found out who elders Lind and Cockbain's replacements are: elders Lyman and Robbins, respectively (Lyman is a Floridian, meaning I will probably spend around 9/10 months of my mission with a Floridian companion, which is funny). I had actually suggested that elder Lyman might one day be in the office, so that was interesting too. 

We found out on Tuesday that there would not be anymore missionaries in Den Bosch, which was surprising, but it happens. Also, something we knew from Sunday, there would be two sets of sister missionaries in the Haarlem ward: the only unit in the mission to have two companionships of sisters. I thought that was pretty weird. And Tuesday morning, we got a message from the APs saying that elder Melligan and sister Riley were delayed in Texas, due to thunderstorms, and would only fly in on Wednesday. This really messed up the whole plan for that day and the next. But we got them here and trained a bit before shipping them off to their cities. Melligan is really cool: he is from New Zealand and played rugby. Elder Praag arrived about the same time as the trainers, and it is a pity to see him go.

Later on Wednesday, elders Lyman and Robbins arrived, and my current companions started their training. I also spoke to elder Lyman about improving the current referral system, using an online program to send SMSes and java. He seems to think we can do it and I am really excited to get started. We looked into ways to do it and began planning it that evening and into the next two days. We also worked on plotting out the different postcodes that match up to which units. It is a laborious process, but should make future referral campaigns a lot easier, a lot less time-consuming, and most importantly, a lot more reliable. By this morning, we had finished the part of the java program to read phone numbers and names from a spreadsheet and process the data.

We invited the APs to play football with us this morning, so there were 9 missionaries in total, and 4 other people. It was kind of fun. 

APs, office elders and elder Praag (with the cardigan)