Dear Grandchildren,
Some of you know by now that Marinn’s drill team took nationals. Yes, nationals! It is not every day that someone takes state. And it is much more rare to take nationals. Her drill team from Uintah High School in Vernal, Utah, swept up the hardware in Las Vegas. Slick as a whistle. Shucks, they went in as a lower seed from the state of Utah where they had fought to a second place finish a couple of weeks ago behind perennial power Hillcrest, topping longtime favorite Bountiful in the process. Though their tails should have been between their legs, they weren’t. Instead, they pulled on their boot straps, or whatever they grab just before going on the hardwood, and danced and strutted their way to the upper stratosphere of high school competition. (Remember, the last national championship team from Utah was a very good boys’ basketball team from Lone Peak a few years ago. And those guys got a ton of love from the media. Marinn’s team, I predict, will not.) Let it soak in, dear Marinn. It will be a bunch of decades before this sort of thing happens again in Utah.
By now, you may be aware that Grandma and I went off to Yerevan, Armenia, for some training in the Church’s history program that is not family history. This one is called Church History, not a scintillating title. Armenia is bordered by Turkey on its southwest, but its time is two hours ahead. Don’t ask me why. It just is. In my opinion, it should be only one hour ahead because Turkey is all in one time zone and Armenia is the next country to the east. But no. The Armenians do it differently. I don’t know why. They just do. That meant, of course, getting up two hours earlier than we are accustomed to rising. Like going to New York City from Salt Lake City. It’s time is just way out there. But the only morning we paid was coming back. We got up at 3 a.m. our bodies’ time so that we could catch the plane back to Istanbul where we waited for three hours for the next flight.
I must say that there is a different feel about Armenia. I don’t know what it is. I didn’t sense that people were any friendlier or better looking. To be sure, they don’t have as many pharmacies as the Turks do, so maybe they are generally healthier (here we see a pharmacy every block). The capital city is very open to the sky with wide streets and large squares and park areas. We found an ice skating rink, something that we don’t see here because we don’t see that kind of cold. The food was good, except at one restaurant where it was not served hot and it seemed that the waiter was trying to avoid us rather than taking care of us. Almost everyone we met speaks at least three languages, Armenian, Russian and English. An Armenian woman from the Yerevan stake, who was also receiving training, is a professor of math and physics at a local university. She was introduced to the Church by her sister fifteen years ago.
A family of three showed up at our services this morning after a three-hour bus ride from a city in our branch where they have recently moved. They brought her sister as a translator from English to Farsi. You see, they are from Iran. The mother and father joined the Church in Georgia (the country) three years ago. It was the first time we have seen a child under a year and a half in our meetings. As you might imagine, he brought a lot of life to our gathering after he warmed up to his new surroundings. The father recently received the Melchizedek Priesthood. Now we have to figure out how to accommodate them on Skype three weeks of the month when they don’t come to the branch. None of them speaks much Turkish and no in our branch speaks Farsi, although a fellow who speaks the language is moving closer and closer to joining the Church. We are becoming a most interesting mix of cultures and languages.
Thursday I received a text from the MP asking that I call him. I did. Among other things, he wanted to talk about another assignment for me. No, not one to replace an assignment that already sits on my lap. One to be added on. You are already ahead of me. I am now a new counselor in the mission presidency. He said that we wouldn't meet much because the other counselor is in Kazakhstan, four hours away by plane. And three time zones. So we shall meet on occasion by phone or by Skype. The temple recommends from our Orem stake run out tomorrow for Grandma and me. I asked him whether I could sign on all three lines of the form for my recommend. That brought a laugh but not permission. I know that we shall go on the road to other branches, perhaps as often as once a month. We shall see. I want to figure out how to take some of the load from the MP, if that is possible from a distance. I told him that my job heretofore was not to hear from him very often because that would mean that he was not worrying about what we were doing and how we were doing it. Now I shall hear from him rather regularly, I suspect. But that will be for the good.
I love you and pray for each of you.
Grandpa Brown
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