Mission Report No 43

 My writing here this week is going to be necessarily brief. I have spent many hours at the computer, publishing 4 episodes of my "Gather In" interviews. Sitting at the computer is bad for me physically, so I will be just focusing on the interviews for a while, with a very brief mention of other things we have done in the last week.

It has really taken us 10 months to become busy here in Cairns. And now doing these interviews has become a time consuming project, which I need to fit in with everything else, but I think it is a very worthwhile exercise. The stories that we are preserving here are worth preserving, and being available to help uplift other members of the Church and also those people who are thinking about becoming members of the Church is a good thing. It is probably good for the people telling their stories too, helping them to relive the moment as they re-tell their life-changing story.

I am uploading the videos to YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Spotify (which now does video), just to reach as broad an audience as possible. Once it's uploaded to Spotify (Anchor.FM actually) it is then spread via RSS to many other podcast platforms (but not all). I have to upload manually to Podbean and they have a storage limit on their free accounts, so they won't ever have all episodes there. Spotify/Anchor is free with no limits.

On Wednesday 25th January I interviewed Matthew Smith, who is our District Executive Secretary, and an all-round good bloke. Here is his interview on YouTube

The previous week I interviewed (and then published this week) 3 other people.

I know I have mentioned Heta Erueti before on my weekly report before. Here is his video - 

I also interviewed a sister that we met while visiting Tara Tutavake. Patira was hesitant to go "on video" but she tells a wonderful story.

And then one when I was checking Messenger, I noticed my old friend, Oleg Lewinski, from Ballarat Ward was online. I knew he would have an interesting story and that, as a man with a lot of acting experience, he would tell the story well, which he did. We used Zoom to record this interview. All the others I used Instagram, which I think gives a better result.

Anyway here's Oleg!

I would be most grateful if you would "like" and comment on YouTube  for me. It will help in the search results and help more people see the videos.

This coming week I am interviewing Hanna Seriac, an Assistant Editor at Deseret News in Salt Lake City. I got to know Hanna through her podcast with FAIR. She has a fascinating story to tell. She is a great writer and you will find many of her articles online at the DN website. Hopefully I should be able to put her interview online later in the week.