The last week was a tale of two halves for the missionaries in the Northern Territory. Elders East and Evans had been tracting and teaching between Thursday and Saturday, and had some people who were going to come along to Church on Sunday. Unfortunately, they then got the message on Sunday morning that due to Covid concerns in the community that Church meetings were being canceled. The whole Darwin and Palmerston region received only 90 minutes notice that the government was implementing a several-day lockdown starting at 1pm on the Sunday afternoon.
Elder East said that there was then a mad rush on the shops. They were able to head over to a member's home to have sacrament before the lockdown and saw that the nearby shopping centre car parks were full with many people now parking on the surrounding roads. People were trying to get into the shops to buy stuff before the lockdown started.
Since the lockdown started, Elder East has been able to call upon his experience from earlier in his mission by conducting a lot of missionary work and lessons via phone calls and Zoom. Only three of the missionaries in the NT have experience in doing missionary work during a lockdown so he's providing training to the Zone about how to adjust their missionary work. He said that one of the things to focus on is that when using technology for lessons, the lessons need to be a lot shorter and more succinct than what you would do when teaching in person.
They've been having success calling and teaching during the lockdown period, and on Tuesday even managed to teach a lesson to a lady down in Alice Springs. She was in Palmerston pre-lockdown and was visiting friends who were tracted out by the Elders. She was receptive and they were able to exchange contact details and then subsequently arrange to teach her remotely.
Elder East says that he'd like to get out to see more of the remote areas in the Northern Territory. He commented that there is meant to be a branch in Katherine, but that everybody there is currently less-active. He says that he'd love to go down and help reactivate 5 or 6 people to help get the branch going again and then do missionary work in the area.
President Marquis broadcast a farewell on Sunday evening to the mission via Zoom. He was conducting a several day handover with the new president starting 28th June, and flying out on the 1st July.. President Johansson, the new mission president, arrived in the mission on Monday and called Elders East and Evans on Tuesday evening. Elder East described him as "pretty chill". He was calling just to say hello and to let them know that he's hoping to come up soon and to visit them in the NT. Given the current lockdown, he may need to do his official "meet & greet" via Zoom.
A couple of final dot point notes from our chat:
- For P-Day during lockdown, the NT missionaries tried doing some games via Zoom.
- They had some issues with their grocery shopping earlier in the day. They tried using the self-checkouts at the shops, however, the system has issues with the Bank of America debit cards that they are issued with.
- Elder East asked if we could send through some English-Samoan dictionaries or documents to help him understand some of the Samoan language he's trying to teach himself. He's said before that Samoan is kind of like an unofficial second language of the mission.
- We got to see a bit of the view from their flat as Elder East went out onto their balcony at one point whilst talking with us.
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