East to West Coast Gratitude: A Glimpse of Battalion Happenings

September 18th - October 30, 2024

Gratefully, due to mold and safety, we were able to move four of our sisters out of the condo apartment located near the Mormon Battalion Historic Site. Now we have everyone living in the Arrive apartment complex under one roof. Happy day!

Our weekly site trainings have been varied as usual. We had some on personal and site safety issues. We also talked about how to handle rowdy children on tours, how to give short tours, how to use the art in the building for a short tour, and what are our good closing procedures. We also began having a "Battalion Moment" and this time we explained why the men of the Battalion were given outdated muskets to use and how they felt about their temple covenants.

We established and began realizing our goal to take the sisters to the Newport Beach Temple once a transfer, which is every six weeks. This has been a coordinating challenge but very much worth the effort. We look forward to when the San Diego Temple is reopened. Hopefully, it will be before we finish our mission in February 2026.

Sisters Polanco, Salazar, Cox, South, Despain, Earl, and Rosin.

Elder and Sister Sturges helped us drive
Sisters Pepper, Diede, Stoddard, Cook, Rowley, and Howlett to the temple.

We worked on how to teach principles from Preach My Gospel (PMG) using scenarios that have actually happened with visitors. We strengthened our testimony of Joesph Smith and the Restoration by listening to "Profiles of a Prophet". We began some awareness and discussions on, "Questions that Need Answering".

We began music practices for our holiday performances, and started making plans for how we will celebrate Thanksgiving Day as a Battalion. And due to some needed surgery by the brother who could help us with our outside Christmas lights, we actually put them up the first two Saturdays in October. (Crazy) But we are now ready to be turned on our outside Christmas lights on Thanksgiving night. (We will be putting up our inside Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving.)

The sisters had some fun with a Yoga night and a morning with bagels and a country
line dancing activity. A group of sisters went and played early morning basketball
and pickleball in a park with Elder and Sister Jones.

The sisters have a tradition of a color themed social where every companionship is assigned a color and they are supposed to bring a food that color to their evening social. The companionship assigned orange had some extra fun with it.

After having various presentation on the importance of our mental and emotional health, and have needing to send sweet Sister Vicente home to Mexico to receive the emotional help she needed, we decided our movie night would be Inside Out 2. Although not a church movie, it taught and reinforced some valuable emotional health awareness. The sisters loved it, and we had a great discussion afterwards.

Sister Kauffman and Sister Cox

And of course, they love to take selfies and pictures of each other wearing "matching" clothes. And personally for us, we had an unanticipated visit from our son-in-law, Camron Hill. Always a delight to have family come see us!