June 19, 2017

Dear Family,

We’ve been here a full month tomorrow working at the Manhattan Temple has been a rich learning experience with lots of new expectations. Each temple has its methods of accomplishing the patron experience and we have to learn their procedures. The shift coordinators are local members as it should be. Some are limited in their experience as well as educational levels. Many are from Hispanic communities with different management skills. The temple patrons are about 50% Spanish speaking and there seems to be an effort to help them grow and develop.

On Saturdays we stay busy working with the non-English speakers. I am thrilled to use our talent to help them with our communication skills. It’s like being in Guatemala for a little while.
Today, Sunday, we attended our ward and I was able to teach the priesthood lesion. Our ward is predominately made up of a Black Spanish speaking people from the Dominican Republic. There are people from Central America and some from Ecuador and Peru.
The Bronx, where we meet, is considered by the church as a 3rd world country. They are very poor people. I’m not surprised that we were sent here to serve.

In the temple there is a sister who is from India. When she was baptized there were six members in the whole country (and two of those were a missionary couple). Now there are two stakes. She has a write-up of her conversion story which she shared with us. It should be printed in the Ensign magazine. Maybe we should send you the write up. [Note from Jeanine—I’m not sure I want to re-type six pages!] She truly seems to come from a miraculous background.

I hope that each of our combined family members find solutions to their problems and has joy in their journey. I’m thinking at age 75 that this mortal experience is brief, but, oh so necessary and that one day we can be together on the other side where we will continue to find our way. Oh, thank goodness for the Savior!

Spencer

PS [from Jeanine—I get to do this because I am the one typing!] When Spencer mentioned the number of non-English speakers, I wanted to share an example. One afternoon this week, in one session we had 11 sisters who spoke five different languages. In descending order, they were—English, Spanish, Mandarin, Korean and French (from Haiti). That was interesting in name issue and at the veil!