Last night I got my best Christmas present - I got to talk to Jeffrey on his mission in Mexico. It was wonderful to talk to him, but also extremely expensive. For various reasons, we haven’t been able to get a landline here in Italy. We only have cell phones. We have a Magic Jack, which is a phone system we use with our computer which lets us call the United States for free. I know there’s a way to make international calls with the Magic Jack, but whenever I clicked on their link to set it up, it said their server was down. Whether their server was really down, or whether our internet was too slow and crappy to handle their server is unknown. Skype was out of the question because Jeffrey didn’t have access to a computer yesterday. So we decided to use our cell phones. We knew it would be expensive, but it was our only option.
Cell phones in Italy are different. You don’t sign up for a plan. You put a certain amount of money on your phone and replenish it as needed. We all had money on our phones, but we decided to add more. Robert put an additional 50 euros on his phone (so he probably had over 75 euros on it) and 25 euros on my phone (so I probably had 50 euros).
Christmas night we called Jeffrey. We tried to put the cell phone on speaker, but we could barely hear him, so we gave up on that idea. I talked to him for a little while, then passed the phone to Brian, who passed the phone to Scott when he was done. About 20 minutes into the phone call, Scott said there was a beep and then the phone went dead. We then got a message saying we had less than 1 euro left on the phone! We went through over 75 euros in 20 minutes! We next called him on my phone. Scott finished up his call, and handed the phone to Kimberly. She talked to him a while then gave the phone to Robert. After about 15 minutes, my phone went dead too. It was out of money. We couldn’t even get Scott’s phone to work - he may have been too low on money. Robert quickly raced over to the bank and put 50 more euros on his phone (you do that at the ATM). I called and talked to him another 15 minutes and then the phone went dead. Our Christmas conversation with Jeffrey was over.
We did get to talk to him for about 50 minutes, but we spent at least 175 euros to do it! With the exchange rate, that’s almost $230.00!
But you know what? It was worth it. Every cent of it. It was money well spent to talk to Jeffrey and hear that he is doing well and loving his mission.
My Christmas was complete.
2 comments:
I would guess that when you have a son on a mission that to talk to him is probably your only Christmas wish, so definitely worth it!! Glad you had a good talk!
That would've wiped out our entire Christmas budget! What a boost to be able to hear his voice saying how well he's doing. Missions rock.
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