Busy Sunday Helping Others

After we came home from Church, LaVal Houskeeper came over. He has also been called to serve as a FamilySearch support missionary but has not had the opportunity to move forward as we have had. He has not yet even taken any practice phone calls, much less real ones. We started training earlier than he did and have already taken well over 100 calls and I'm now not only taking calls on my own, but taking calls when nobody else is even available. That has left me with less backup, but nothing I couldn't handle (so far!).

Anyway, he came over to watch me take a few call-backs. One was to a phone number in Utah. I had tried to call but nobody was home. Just as I was about to phone back, I noticed a call waiting in the queue. "I'll just take that call," I said. Lo and behold, it was the same person from Utah. That is quite a coincidence considering that there are 100,000 people with access to nFS and 600 support missionaries taking calls! Turns out this number "from Utah" was really a full-time missionary in Argentina and the phone was forwarding his calls. "Someone tried to call me in the middle of the night!" he said. (Oops!). He was calling now so that wouldn't happen again. He was computer literate and genealogically savvy and we were able to whiz through his questions on combining ancestor submissions to find "missing" temple ordinances. LaVal was amazed. "He's pretty fast," I said. "Well, it was too fast for me; I couldn't keep up," replied LaVal.

Next was a woman in Nova Scotia, four hours later. She was discouraged. "This isn't a very friendly website!" she complained. "Let's see if we can help you with that," I said. Somehow, she had linked her parents' information as her husband's parents, not just her own. I showed her how to fix that and then I took her on a tour of nFS showing her the satellite map feature, the
timeline, the Help Center, how to claim her previous contributions to Ancestral File, gave her the toll free phone number, and showed her the FH Consultant training aides.
She felt much more enthusiastic and hopeful about helping others in her ward.

Anyway, to cut it short, I took six cases, LaVal looking on all the while. He was not overwhelmed but much that he had learned from his training videos suddenly made sense to him. As with all of us, we learn from doing and seeing much more than from just hearing. One of the cases asked, "Why are you taking calls on the sabbath?" I explained that the paid support weren't because if was a salaried job but I was a volunteer missionary and what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than helping others with family history? She agreed.

After LaVal left, another frantic email came into the system. A woman in California had made a mess and sorted most of it out. But she had sent in an earlier email from help and somebody had replied with a standard form labelled, "Comfort about nFS." Needless to say, this woman was not impressed. I knew someone would simply send her another emails so I thought I'd just give her a quick call. Since it was getting late, I told Merry I would just call to set up an appointment to help her the next day. "When would be convenient?" I asked. "Right now!" was the reply. So that took awhile! I think she needed to talk more than anything else. I told her she was doing it
right and that helped her to feel a lot better.
She actually understood nFS very well and was very high energy. I gave her the toll-free number for future problems.

Now it was time for bed ... but, no! Here came a Skype call from our missionary leader. And a video call, at that. She had never done that before so it was curious. We chit-chatted for awhile before she told us that her assistant leader was not going to extend her calling and would be quitting soon. Was I interested. Well, of course. But I had already been called as a training assistant, starting in a month. "Might be too late," she said, "but I'll check." (Nice to be wanted.) And thus ended a full Sabbath afternoon.