Salt Lake City Public Affairs Training

We've arrived in Salt Lake

Looking for our escorts

Wednesday, March 20th, our flight took off at 2:15 pm to head for Salt Lake for public affairs training...the first leg of our mission adventure. It finally hit us...we are not coming back for 18 months! It's kind of surreal. Shannon took us to the airport and saw us off...I couldn't believe that we would not see her or Darin or the twins or our son Ryan and his dog Leo for 18 months. This was not like going on a vacation and coming back a couple of weeks later...talk about stepping out of our comfort zone!

We arrived about 5:30 Austin time and were picked up by the Larsens, who are now on a public affairs mission training the rest of us. They returned from their mission to New Zealand about six months ago and when they found out this mission was available, they requested they be considered. They live just outside of SLC.

The Larsen couple and us after taking us to our hotel

We are staying at Little America, a very nice hotel and were pretty zonked last night, so retired early.

Thursday, March 21st:

At 8:00 we caught the rail in front of our hotel on Main Street. It was snowing as we walked the block to pick it up. I certainly did not bring enough clothes for this cold weather, but managed okay. Our training was at the Joseph Smith building next to Temple Square on the tenth floor. The training room had a view of the snow covered mountains...WOW! It was an awesome day! There were six other couples...one to West Africa, one to Kenya, us in SE Africa and one going to Australia, one to Taiwan and another to Frankfurt, Germany...all of us different, but somehow all the same.The public affairs team for the church is very impressive. We first heard from our Manager of Area Relations, Clark Hirschi who talked to us about Public Affairs Dept Organization, Priesthood Leadership & Councils, their core purpose and the three stop process. He was very impressive. We then heard from

Kim Woodbury, another Manager of Area Relations. She gave us some great information on Public Affairs websites, newsroom websites and Director of Public Affairs info. We then went to a devotional on the Mezzanine Level. All public affairs employees meet at 11:00 am and have a devotional with a song and prayer, report on what's going on in Public Affairs and a preassigned inspirational message. We, along with the five other missionary couples were also announced in the meeting and told what a great thing we are doing. It was very special. We then went to lunch on a restaurant on the tenth floor where you can look out at the temple and angel Moroni. Everywhere we went in the building was like having a spiritual experience. How fun it would be to work there every day. Lunch was amazing. We sat with the area manager over us and learned a lot about him. He is very smart and amazingly accomplished. They have great food in Salt Lake. After lunch we went back to the meeting room and heart from David Watson (another Manager of Area Relations) and learned about our country's newsroom website and how we will be contributing to that website. The best instruction of the day was the last speaker, Kim Farah, who does a lot of public affairs for the church and also is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's publicist. She told many stories about what is going on in the church and how they handle the various questions and bad publicity. It was fun, informative and very helpful. She then did a writing exercise with us and told us how to put together impactful articles for the newsroom websites. WOW, we are so excited to be here.

Elder Kyle looking into lobby of training building

This is our daily training room