Our Back Story

Welcome to our (Ann and Paul Wilson) blog of our mission to the Dominican Republic. No idea how often we will post. Probably not very. Lots of stuff to share initially, however. So here we are,  newly planted at the Provo MTC (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' Missionary Training Center on the north east edge of the BYU campus in Provo, Utah).

We have just arrived to begin our 18 month mission to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to serve in the Caribbean Area offices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as Associate Area Legal Counsel. This blog will share some of our experiences, observations, and thoughts of our 18 months. Pretty much every day during MTC week we took notes and wrote impressions. Now we just need to take the time to put it together and post it. But first, a little about our path of senior service.

Serving several senior missions has been a topic of occasional conversation throughout our marriage; something we have been looking forward to for a long time. From Paul's perspective, "At last, a companion of my choice!" From Ann's, "I will never have the stress of being the senior companion!"

As we passed through our mid-50s, we began talking in more concrete terms, and we started looking at the church's Senior Missionary Opportunities bulletin with great interest.  The online bulletin, https://www.lds.org/bc/content/ldsorg/callings/missionary/senior-missionary/senior-missionary-opportunities.pdf  currently, in 2017, quarterly prints out about 35 pages of specific church needs for full time senior missionaries (in addition to the endless need for local "senior service missionaries).

A decade or so ago, in reading the Senior Missionary Opportunities, Ann came across a request for a senior missionary for the "internal mystery shopping program / customer service department at the PCC" (Polynesian Cultural Center adjacent to BYU Hawaii). That was what Paul & Brian's company was all about. Paul called the PCC to talk about it and the PCC indicated interest in him when the timing worked out for both us and the PCC. The future was becoming more real. (Side note: to date, their openings and our availability have never matched up.)

Finally, Paul and Brian sold their business, and we sold our wonderful house of 26 years where we had raised our kids. It was time to begin missionary service.

We regularly scoured the Senior Missionary Opportunities to see if something spoke to our souls as something we should talk to the missionary department about arranging. What actually happened instead is that the last listed item in the bulletin jumped out at us: "Other: Non-Missionary Opportunity. China Teachers' Program" through the BYU David Kennedy Center.

The church, through BYU,  sends about 80 seniors a year to teach at some of China's best universities, building important relationships and friendships for the church. It sounded hard to us, and so, feeling adaptable and willing to do "hard," we started filling out the applications which were similar to the standard Senior Missionary applications and included the same ecclesiastical interviews.

This resulted in us spending two years in China (2012-2014) having a spectacular (but hard) missionary experience while teaching undergraduate Chinese students in the English Department of Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, China.

Go to our other blog, Ann & Paul in China, if you are interested in details. In all cases, put "China Teaching" at the top of your list for a Senior Mission - and for sure don't let their age 65 limit pass you by.

As China drew to a close, our plans were to come home, play with the grandkids for a while, then head to the mission field again. That plan got detoured.

Our stake president, President Jonathan Toronto, called us, while we were traveling home by way of Tibet and Mt Everest. The call was for a church service mission assigned as Area Coordinators for the Addiction Recovery Program, training and leading the Recovery Group Leaders, and being a resource to their priesthood leaders, in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Montana, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. We think this might be the only mission call issued to members of the church in Tibet.

Based from our home, this resulted in lots of miles, lots of inspiring and dedicated Group Leaders and church leaders, and 25 months of a wonderful, uplifting  mission.

During our 24th month of service, with no clear end point for our Area assignment, our stake president, who at this point is now also our son, informed us that he had just called our replacements, that in another month we would be released, and that we needed to immediately submit mission papers to Salt Lake City for a new missionary assignment. We loved what we were doing, but we were thrilled to be able to switch gears, ready to go abroad.

We scrambled to complete our forms and meet the medical requirements. Surprisingly, medical actually slowed us down, but nothing of great consequence. Our papers were finally again ready to submit! (Our son told us it was actually a 64 page document that he submitted to SLC. They want to know a lot about seniors.)

As we worked on our medical items, we continued to scour the Missionary Opportunities Bulletin to see if there was something that spoke to our hearts as an opportunity we should pursue. Dozens of different types of opportunities looked interesting to us, but nothing we were inclined to pursue. We comfortably decided our papers were going to be submitted "pot luck," and we would offer no input on our assignment, other than availability. 

On our final reading of the Senior Missionary Opportunities Bulletin before submission, the topic of "Office of General Counsel" "appeared" out of no where, for the first time in all our viewing. That was one item that we knew we would not be called to.  (Ok; so maybe, possibly, that item has been there all along - but we don't think so; we truly never noticed it before.)

Long story short, we are now in the Dominican Republic for 18 months serving as Associate Area Legal Counsel for the Caribbean Area, with the most amazing ultimate Client of all.