Oh, the Things You Can Do With a Hanger!

In the New York South Mission there are 9 zones.  Every 6 weeks we have mega zone conferences with two or three zones.

I have mentioned in an earlier blog that we are given 20 minutes at each conference to teach important principles concerning missionary apartments and how to maintain and clean them.  We try to make our presentation fun and informative.  As we reviewed the telephone calls from missionaries the previous 6 weeks, 4 problems seemed to dominate the conversations.  Bugs...vacuums...clogged drains, and toilets that don't flush.

My dear companion, Elder Johnson, was so sweet in asking me to cover the topics of drains and toilets.  Neither are great topics to cover, especially during the lunch hour.  How to make it fun???

Years ago, when I had a sink that would not drain, Richard took a wire clothes hanger and devised a simple tool with a hook on the end.  Just insert the tool in the drain and because of the hook on the end, you can pull out all sorts of "gunk" from the drain.  The sister missionaries all have beautiful long hair so their sinks are always clogging. Richard made one for each sister missionary (I added the ribbon).  They were delighted.  We told the elders when in the not too distant future they will have wives and daughter who will come to them with clogged sinks, and they too can become heroes.  The mission president thought we should go on the TV show Shark Tank, in which inventors and investors are brought together to compete on which invention will be promoted and financed. Who knows........