Foreign Phone Calls

I've been feverishly working on the "map project" that I started a few days ago, because Elder L generously offered them for the meeting that he will have with President Hansen tomorrow. Right in the middle of looking up and locating missionary addresses on the maps the phone rings. It was from a Senior Elder in France who was calling for a couple whose daughter is serving in our mission.

Just for a little background, I send out a form to be filled out and returned 4 months before each missionary returns home. When I received their form it was for a flight to DeGaulle airport in Paris. I spoke with our missionary, knowing that they live 3 hours from Paris, and she seemed to think it wouldn't be a problem. So today's call was a request to add an additional flight from Paris to Lille. The Elder had already spoken to the travel office and they told him it needed to go through the mission.

I was working on an email to Travel when the phone rang again--it hadn't rung all day until the France call--and it was a mom of one of our elders. She's on vacation in England and her son didn't receive his 3 month supply of medication which should have been delivered last Thursday. I told her that, quite frankly, Louisiana mail stinks! (I'll get back to that later.) Without going into the details, we decided that I'd call her son to see if he's completely out of meds. If he is I'd give him the doctor's phone number so the elder could call and request him to call a local pharmacy to supply a few pills till the shipment arrived. I made sure he had a home credit card, because, at this point, insurance wasn't going to cover any more than the 3 months they'd just paid for. I called the elder who'd run out of Rx 2-3 days ago, gave him phone numbers for the doctor and a local pharmacy, and asked him to let me know what happened. About 2 hours later he called to tell me that his meds had just been delivered. Whew!

Here's the latest LA mail issue. Last week I made rolls for the MTC grandson knowing that he wouldn't have "Ma-Ma's rolls" for 2 years. That's not really a big deal, except I know he loves them, and there aren't too many things you can send to the MTC unless they can be used before leaving for Italy--which was today. There's just not luggage space. I baked them Tuesday night, boxed them Wednesday morning, and sent Marc to the post office to overnight them. He came back with the guarantee or your money back that they'd be delivered Thursday by noon. Great! They'd still be fairly fresh and edible. Thursday morning I started tracking them and, surprise, they were in Oakland, CA! Needless to say, I was livid, and they weren't delivered until Friday afternoon. There's so much more to this story and Marc's 3 trips to the post office, but he did get his money back. I have no idea what condition the rolls were in or if the MTC workers even got them to Anziano Blocker. At this point, it's the thought that counts, right?