Stephen and Elaine Biddulph

18-24 May 2015

So, yet another week has passed on our mission. The past week has been busy, busy, busy! Lots of calls with missionaries and new requests coming from mission presidents. I have been trying to coordinate a visit to a psychiatrist for a missionary in the Paris France Mission. I've been monitoring him by telephone for several weeks. He has suffered with significant depression, and because I am not licensed to practice in Germany I really cannot do counseling, other than give him suggestions and help answer his questions. A counselor in Salt Lake City who worked with this elder for 9 months when he returned home the first time from his mission is helping doing the counseling, and we are working together. We have an LDS psychiatrist who lives in Liege, Belgium, which is just in the northeast corner of the Paris France Mission. I finally arranged an appointment this past Wednesday for the missionary and his companion to meet with him on Friday. They traveled by train to Liege to meet with him. The psychiatrist said he showed all of the signs of major depression, so he placed him on an antidepressant. He wants to see him back in one month. We had a challenge helping the elder stay focused and persevere until we could get him this appointment. These are the kinds of things we do all of the time. The Church's stated policy is that psychotropic medications are not supposed to be started in the field, rather, the missionary should return home to get stabilized before returning to the field. However, since this missionary had already been home once, we didn't want him to go home a second time, so we got approval to try this. We'll see how it works out. It is hard doing things long distance.
Elaine does most of the administrative work for me. When we get a new missionary assigned, she goes into church medical site and gathers information about prior and current problems that might relate to the issues at hand. She creates a data sheet with a picture of the missionary, telephone number, mission, mission president name and contact information, and any background information.

Judith and Jon

She also does the monthly reports for us that include the number of missionaries I spoke with that month, number of sessions done, number of missionaries completed, and number of new missionaries added for that month. This goes into Salt Lake City and they tabulate all of this information.
This week I had our monthly webex meeting with Salt Lake City and other Area Mental Health Advisors around the globe. We had people on-line from Hong Kong, South Pacific, South America, Africa, Europe, Russia, etc. It is fun and helpful to hear what others are doing and experiencing in their areas. We also went to the Ordnungs Amt in Frankfurt and applied for our German drivers licenses. I don't know why we did Elaine because she will not drive over here. She makes me do all the driving. But, I suppose it will be a keepsake for her.

Judith and Jon

It is a long weekend this Memorial Day. Monday the Europe Area Offices are closed. Most of the senior missionaries have taken off for 2-3 days of travel and sightseeing. I had to be here for church on Sunday. It is my month to conduct the gemeinde meetings. Saturday, we drove over to Offenbach gemeinde house and fixed lunch for the 4 full-time missionaries and then talked missionary work. We discussed strategies on how to find and fellowship members who are less active, and how to help with the work of finding new investigators. The ward council has caught the spirit of this work, and we spend each Sunday talking about members and investigators. On Saturday we also stopped by and visited a woman named Judith and his 18-month old son, Jon. She lives just across the street from the meetinghouse. She is not a member, but her husband, Robert, is a member and is a branch president in
Norway where he is completing his studies. Judith and son will join him once her visa papers are finished.
We are enjoying being together on this mission. It is just what the doctor ordered. We needed this together time alone to recapture ourselves independent of other loved ones and life's worries and concerns. This is really fun and unifying. Next month we celebrate 47 years of marriage. Wow! Elaine gets the award for most long-suffering and perseverent. When I was at home one of the things I did with my grandson, McCoy, was build Dominos towers and he would always knock them down. We found Dominos in the apartment, so, I built a tower and took a picture of it for McCoy. This tower he can't knock down.