Central Eurasian Mission - Kazakhstan, Astana
November 17th, 2016

Dad and I had been talking for awhile about gong on a mission - for instance when we were walking the Camino we'd talk about it......."we're healthy now"....."we're still young enough to do big things"...."Warren and Malcolm along with their spouses live at Brunner Manor and can take care of our home and property"......lots of good reasons, besides the reason to Serve.

Finally, on November 17, 2016 we actually went to the computer and googled LDS Senior missionary opportunities.  There, laid out in that document, were all the types of missions that senior couples are called to.  We looked through all of the possibilities and settled on doing a Humanitarian Mission.  Then we scrolled to the section that which shows the future openings.  The first three were French speaking (nope), the next was English Kazakhstan, the fourth and fifth were French (nope, nope,), and the sixth was English Kazakhstan.  So, it was to be Kazakhstan with the earliest opening in March.  An added perk was that Russian is spoken in Kazakhstan, along with Kazakh. We filled out our application, got all medical records updated, had our interviews, and two weeks later officially submitted our application (I pressed 'send' on President Leptich's iPhone).

Then the wait for the white envelope began.  Finally on Saturday December 24th the envelope arrived about 8PM (Christmas mail and bad weather really clogged up delivery of mail).  It was too late to have family come for the opening.



Christmas Day was Sunday and we waited until our Sunday family dinner when all the family would be present to open the envelope.  You can see that Tyler wants the first peek.  Drum roll!!  Dear Brother and Sister Gray, you have been called to serve the Lord in Kazakhstan in the city of Astana.
We were very happy, but really not surprised at the location since we'd already been in contact with the mission president in Istanbul and the welfare leader in Moscow.  We were to report to the MTC on March 20th....a mere three months wait.



We started acquiring all the clothes we needed right away.  By Christmas I pretty much had everything.  I got all of my clothes from Red White and Blue Thrift story and got Dads from JC Penneys.  I got nice suitcases from the Columbia outlet store, set them up and started adding the clothes and other things as we thought of them.





One of the trickiest things was to get an eighteen month supply of our meds.  Usually when you get a prescription filled it is for a month's worth of meds or maybe 90 days worth.  One's insurance simply won't authorize any more than 30 or 90 days of meds.  We had to get Aetna insurance from the church which will cover us while we are out of the United States (Kaiser and medicare won't work in Kazakhstan}  The good thing about Aetna is that you can get a year's worth of meds at one time.  For the additional 6 months we did some creative prescription filling, but finally met our goal of 540 pills of each kind we needed.  Below is a pictures (sorry it is upside down) of Dad's sorted out on the floor.  It really was kinda a big deal and caused a lot of stress, but we were told that it would be difficult to get in Kaz.  Our supply now consists of all kinds of meds, both prescription and OTC, we might need for the 18 months we are gone.

We made the announcement of our mission to the Ward on New Year's Day.  Most fellow church members didn't know of our plans, so there was a lot of surprise.  Not long after that the Sunday bulletin showed that we were "upcoming missionaries".

Our kids threw us a lovely Farewell Party which was at Jessica's house.  I knew about the party but didn't know that Jessica was also making it a surprise birthday for me.  So I had a cake too, and Happy Birthday sung to me.  Both Dad and I were honored to have so many friends and neighbors come to wish us farewell.

The last week before we left was a really hard time because we wanted to go on our mission, and we were definitely going to go, but leaving the family was very difficult.  We kept making excuses to get together.  The photo below shows our 'last supper' at Sweet Tomatoes. 

Then finally, on Friday March 17th everyone met at our house at 9 PM for the final farewell.  Our Stake President, President Leptich, came to set us apart.  For some reason we didn't get a picture of him.  But here are ones of all children and their families.

Warren won the coin toss and took us to the airport at 3:30 am to catch our flight to Salt Lake City.

Ivan picked us up and we spent the day with his family.  We did errands and then when on a quest to find a food cart that sells Hawaiian doughnuts - the name of which I can not remember.  But they were delicious.

Sunday we went to church. I can honestly report that the church in Utah is the same as the church in Oregon City!  That evening Ivan decided to have a Utah scone neighborhood sidewalk party.  Magnus and Archer went to all the houses on the street announcing the event.  And sure enough, at about 6 pm, many neighbors stopped by to chat and eat the scones.  Ivan has a good recipe - they're like elephant ears.  We had cinnamon and sugar, powdered sugar, and honey to garnish the scones.  I think we should make these instead of sopapillas at Christmas time.

Tomorrow is March 20th the day we enter the MTC and our official mission will begin!