Sights During Apartment Inspections

Because Jena likes to make cards and posters, we decided for our first round of apartment inspections we would make these "candy" posters with Almond Joys, Mounds, and Goldfish snacks.

They were a big hit with missionaries.

The Ft. Smith-Greenwood trio with Jena at their Greenwood apartment.

This time we had 11 apartments to inspect--two in Ft. Smith (two sets of sisters and two sets of elders); Van Buren, Alma, Clarksville, Greenwood, and Mena-all in Arkansas.  And then Talihina, Poteau, Sallisaw, and Gore in Oklahoma.  It is about a 500 mile loop, but we had to do it over four days to work at the schedule for everyone.  All in all, the missionaries are doing a good job of keeping their apartments clean--or at least having them clean when we arrived.  I would say that we have the best apartment in the zone.

Some of the photos I posted earlier of green hills and bridges were taken during these trips to the apartments.

But we did run into a few other fun things in small town, USA.

In Greenwood was a Saturday car show so we stopped for a few minutes to take pictures to send to Tosha and Austen who are car show fans.

In the front yard of the Gore missionaries house was a pretty rooster and hens eating bugs in the yard..

Let me say that although in general the apartments were cleaned and passed inspection, they were an interesting exposure to young missionary life.  There were usually pictures of Jesus hung around but some apartments had beautiful mosaic displays of art work related to Christ which had been collected over the years.  There was usually some place where a collection of companionships' photos who had ever served from that apartment were hung.  In one place, there was a photo of an elder who served over 10 years ago who ended up marrying a woman from Oklahoma and now lives next door to this missionary apartment with his wife. And occasionally there was hall closets stuffed to the top with "stuff" left by former missionaries who didn't have room to take something to their next transfer so they stuffed it into the closet.  

Every apartment had one or more white board where the missionaries did their planning, set their goals, wrote inspirational scriptures and quotes and other type of stuff.  These missionaries are hard working and trying to use good planning skills in their assignments.

The last thing are the collections---toys from Happy Meals, small match box cars, whatever---along the edge of a window sill or on the back of the desk--small reminders that these are young "young adults" and while they are doing a mighty work, they are in the process of becoming like we all are.

We have the best missionaries in Arkansas Bentonville Mission and some of the very best serve in Ft. Smith stake.  Glad to spend time with them even doing something like apartment inspections!