This week's story comes from a less active look up! We went to look up Pablo on Wednesday night. Side note I thought Pablo would be South American but according to his teaching record he is from Africa. Anyways, We rang the bell at his apartment complex and he lets us in without saying anything. On our way in I casually ask if he is Pablo, to which he says yes. We then begin to try to talk with him, but it is quickly apparent that he speaks about 20 words of dutch and another 20 words of English... We asked about 10 times where he is from and he claimed that he was born in Leiden, but it was very obvious that he wasn't from here and that he really didn't understand us.
We continue to talk to Pablo and he seems to not know who we are and what church we were from. Nothing added up! We spend about 20mins getting to know him, his very very basic English and Dutch, but finally I asked the right question. I told him "we just wanted to see how Pablo was doing, so how are you?" then he stops turns around and walks down the hall then screams "Pablo, Where you at?" Turns out "Pablo" was the roommate of Pablo. I was never more confused than trying to figure out how this guy got baptized with the language barrier and how he couldn't remember us! A very odd experience. The Real Pablo wasn't home so we tried to teach the restoration lesson but the language barrier was too big so we left after about 30 seconds.
My project of the week is a re-haul of the number system that our mission uses. Some elder created a program to collect numbers about 10 years ago and it has slowly continued to be outdated. This program didn't collect all of the numbers we use now and there is no real way to use it for analysis. So the Assistants, Elder McConkie, and I spent a day in the office figuring out what we should do and put some ideas together, about 4 hours later we had a concrete idea. We have designed it to create area, district, zone, and mission totals with associating trend graphs. So far I've spend lots of hours over the last 4 days getting it working. Data entry of past weeks, Working out all the equations, and getting them to all simultaneously work together. There is still quiet a bit of work to do, especially with analyzing tools/graphs but it should be up and running by next week. I've learned how amazing of a tool Microsoft Excel is. It blows my mind! I love working on these projects, it is so fun to do things that matter and that also push my knowledge!
Honestly there isn't much else to talk about this week. I sit in an office all day so not too much happens. But I do enjoy the things that happen. I has seen the hand of God even in this office job. In reality, we are a couple of 20 yr olds with no work/Microsoft office/legal/accounting/etc experience and yet we always are able to find solutions to things. There have been several times where I've even had a thought of what sentence I should type into the google search and then find the solution. The Lord definitely looks out for us and makes up for our weaknesses and mistakes!
Love you guys
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Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission