MTC Fairies

One of the great things I love about Carrie Rasmussen's Dream Dinners is what I call the clean-up fairies. Those are the folks that come by after you've put your dinner together and clean up the big mess you made. They wipe up, reorganize everything, whisk dirty dishes into the kitchen, and you waltz out the door with your prepared dinners. I LOVE that!

There are fairies at the MTC too. The bookstore fairies put all of our training materials together for us so all we have to do is pick up the bag with our name on it. The landscaping fairies have planted hundreds of pansies in the flowerbeds around the MTC. The chair fairies are really amazing. There must be thousands of chairs in the MTC in dozens of rooms, including the (many, many) chapels, the cafeteria (must seat 1000), the auditorium, which doubles as a basketball gym when there's no scheduled speaker (must seat 2500) and all the classrooms. Those chairs are set up, taken down, rearranged, put away, and taken out again.

The kitchen fairies are the most fascinating to me. I estimate they feed 3000 people three meals a day--about 9000 meals. We get fresh fruit, hand-dipped ice cream, individual plates of food handed to us, several choices of entrees, fresh rolls, anything you can image to drink (as long as it's caffeine-free) and at the end of our dinner, we put our dirty plates and trays on a conveyor belt for someone else to deal with. The next meal, it's all back again, sparkling clean and full of yummy food.

I spoke to a few of the kitchen fairies today to thank them for working on Sunday. Every one of them told me how delighted they were to serve the missionaries. One even said we missionaries are the ones doing the work. Despite my whining about how many hours I've put in since arriving, I know who is really doing the hard work, and it's the kitchen fairies.

Unfortunately, there's no bathroom-cleaning fairies, no room-vacuuming fairies, no wastecan-emptying fairies, no bed-making fairies (although my kind, wonderful companion, Sr. Byrne, has made my bed a time or two). Inasmuch as those fairies don't exist, guess what's not getting done?