At the age of 50, Sally Murray didn’t have a passport and never dreamed she’d find herself living across the world. But a prompting by the Spirit lead her and her family to Ghana, Africa where she involved herself in helping with schools and fundraising for supplies for the children. Sally learned valuable lessons in love, humility, and an increased capacity to feel the Spirit. Tell me about your background. I was born in Idaho Falls, ID. We moved around quite a bit when I was young, and eventually we ended up in Boise, Idaho, where I was raised. I attended Ricks College for two years and then studied at Boise State University for another year after that. I was married when I was a senior in college and began raising my family of six children. I worked as a stay-at-home mom. We have one daughter and five sons. Sally Miner Murray and Her Family Later in your marriage, you moved to Ghana for your husband’s work. How did that happen? We raised our family, for the most part, in the Boise area until 1997, when my husband was transferred to Salt Lake City for his job with the Church. Carey Woolsey, a man in our ward, was in charge of finding people to go on international assignments and we always teased him, saying, “When are you leaving for Africa?” One April, we were traveling to see our son, who was in prison (and that is another story), and on the way back, I felt Heavenly Father say to me, “You need to go to Africa.” We had our two youngest sons in the car and I argued silently with Heavenly Father for a while and said, “Excuse me, I have my first grandchild, we have a son in prison, and we have a few other issues.” He just gave me an answer for every one of those issues and I turned to my family and said, “We need to go to Africa.” My- 17-year old son, who was going to be a senior in high school, said, “I don’t have anything holding me back,” and my 14-year-old said, “That would be cool,” and my husband looked at me somewhat astounded and said, “Okay, I guess we’re going to Africa!” How did it just come to you that you should move to Africa? Did you know there was an opening? My husband contacted Carey Woolsey–the man in our ward–and told him we were interested in going to Africa. Steve and Carey had discussed the need for a Church finance person to be assigned to Ghana. The person in charge of temporal affairs in Africa, David Stapley, knew my husband and said he’d love to have him. You have to be approved by the Presiding Bishopric in order to take international assignments, and three weeks later they approved us, for some reason, and we went! That was in April of 2005, and we found ourselves in Ghana, Accra, Africa in the middle of August. So you, your husband, and two kids just took off to Ghana? Yes, and I didn’t even have a certified birth certificate, let alone a passport! But before we knew it, we were on a plane to Africa! That must have been quite a shock for you. Tell me about your experience at first. It was very interesting. They moved us into a beautiful guarded compound of twenty townhouses to a home with four bedrooms and a community swimming pool–the Church takes such good care of its international employees. When we went to church in Adenta, a town outside of Accra, for the first time, my husband, Steve, drove, and we didn’t really know where we were going. It took us about an hour to find it. (There are very few street signs in Ghana and so you use local landmarks such as the Shell Gas Station or the pink house on the corner for directions.) When we finally arrived, we realized that church was held in a rented building and no one was speaking English–they spoke Twi. Someone came and sat by us and translated. The next week I was called as an advisor to the Relief Society presidency. We met in my air-conditioned car for our presidency meetings because we had one little light in the building and the mosquitos were prevalent, which raised my concern about malaria. Sally Miner Murray I understand that you helped schools in Ghana. Can you tell me about that? Our existing Relief Society President, Nancy Owusu, was released and Christina Awudi was sustained in her place—and we became dear friends. She had been going to college at the time and had a four-year degree, which is unusual; most teachers in Ghana have two-year degrees. Christina had just been assigned as the headmistress at a school–which is like a principal–and said, “You need to come to Akpormang and see the new school I’ve been assigned to!” I said, “You bet.” So I went to see her at her new school. After getting lost many times on the way there, I arrived. She had about 15-18 kids in a government-built school, which are made of cinderblock, with a tin roof. There were three rooms and a headmistress’s office. I walked inside, and here were these kids with broken pencils, and no books. The students had desks that were much too big for them, and Christina didn’t even have a teacher’s desk. She had a 12 x 12 cardboard box, where she put all her supplies, lying on the floor. During our time in Ghana, friends back home had sent us money and told me to do something with it. I looked at her and said, “I know what we can do with the money that people send.” So I sent out emails to friends and family and told them that I wanted to help with supplies for Christina’s school. And for some reason, people sent us money. The money went straight to supplies. I would drive out once or twice a week and bring her school supplies. We started building round tables for the younger kids so they wouldn’t have to stand at their desks. We supplied a number of things for the school, like chairs, soccer balls, pencils, crayons, and books. Because of that, the parents of the children in the village and surrounding areas started coming around to check out the school’s progress, and Christina started getting more and more students who had been attending other schools that were further away. After that the parents began to show a greater interest and saw what we had done and decided they wanted to start a PTA. At their first PTA meeting, they raised $4 and we supplemented that with $6 more so they could open a bank account for their kids. The village supplied Christina with a desk because of all she had done for their school. This was a great sacrifice for the village, because the cost of the desk was around $75 and their average daily income was $1. When the district became aware of all Christiana was doing, they sent more things for her school. So it was just amazing what small baby steps did and the doors that were opened. It was just wonderful. We worked for about a year with Christina, and I told her, “We’ve done a lot for your school. I wonder if there are any others that need help.” We drove to the district office and I asked them if there was another school we could help, and they told us we needed to go to Ayi Mensah. They gave us directions and we drove down a beautiful road that led to the base of the Aburi Hills to the small village of Ayi Mensa. We parked our little Honda Civic, got out, and asked for directions to the Ayi Mensa School. We were led down the path through the black poly bags (this is what they call black plastic bags that seem to litter most of Africa), through the chickens, and past the corrugated tin fences. There, under a huge tree, were four round tables with about 15-18 beautiful little children. There was one paid teacher and two village moms helping out. We told them we wanted to help and asked them to give us a list of things they needed. Thank heaven for Christina because they spoke very little English. After saying our good-byes, Christina and I drove to the side vendors, who sell their wares along the side of all the roads in Ghana, and bought things that could be used outside: big containers that they could put their supplies in and a bookshelf they could store in somebody’s house to hold the remainder. We worked with them for a year but by that time our international assignment had ended. A week before I left, David, who is the elder in charge of the schools, came to me and said, “The village will donate land for a school if you will build it.” I asked Diana Golden, who had been helping with the school project and was going to be in Ghana for another two years, if she would take over as a facilitator so that I could return to the States and raise money. When I got home, I enlisted the help of the Forever Young Foundation, through Sterling Tanner, their wonderful CEO, and asked if he would which receive the money I collected and then send it straight to Ghana. The school in Ayi Mensa just finished building their sixth room and I believe they are placing a roof over the headmistress’s office. I estimate that from 2006 until now we’ve probably raised–and this is just an estimate–between 40 to 50 thousand dollars and have had an impact on over 1000 students. Sally Miner Murray in Ghana What changes did you see in the children and in the villages as a result of supplying these schools with the supplies that they needed? First of all, these kids now have a chance at education. One of the first things the teachers try to do is teach the students English, because English is technically the language of Ghana, and English is also the language of opportunity. Second, the village communities now have a sense of pride and ownership because they have a school. You now see villages where the people come together to form a PTA. Now that these villages have schools, the kids won’t be bitten by the bugs in the sand anymore. And when it rains, they don’t have to send the kids home. It’s 20 degrees cooler inside those buildings, and during the dry season they have protection from the scorching sun. It’s just pretty amazing, isn’t it? Oh, you’re making me homesick talking about it! What challenges did you experience during this journey? It was hard to watch these teachers try so hard to help these kids but be unable to do as much as they wanted to because they’d had limited educational opportunities. Though they’re doing the best they can, teachers need more training. Challenges with the government were also discouraging. I remember reading an article in the newspaper that said there were no schools meeting under trees in Ghana. It was so interesting because as you went down this beautiful road to Aye Mensa that led up to the presidential palace, there were kids meeting under a tree. That was always discouraging. I watched David, the village elder, try to get the school built. With the first room, the villagers helped build it, but David has been pretty much building the rest. He gets help every once in a while. I watched the men in the villages sit around all day in the shade while the women did all the work, taking care of the children and selling their small goods on the side of the road. It was discouraging to see the villagers not helping David. It is very hard for the men to find work and I often think they need to follow David’s example and do all you can to help others. Africans have received so much humanitarian aid, especially those in Ghana, because it’s a safe place to be. You have to be really careful with how you help. That’s why we didn’t go in and build anything and why we had the villagers build it. That’s why we only offer supplies. We do it for the children, for an educational purpose. We’ve found that education is the best way to help. The gospel and education. The gospel changes lives and education makes it possible. Tell me some of the small miracles and triumphs you saw along the way? Well, who would have thought a girl from Idaho would be building a school in Ghana? Who would have thought a girl from Idaho would even go to Ghana? I have seen the tender mercies that come when you accept callings from Heavenly Father. These experiences change not just your life, but your family’s life. Our family has had some wild experiences, but our children have been blessed because of what we’ve been doing. How did the Lord touch your life through your experiences in Ghana? You know, we talked about that a lot with the other Church employees in Ghana. We all talked about what we love most about doing this, and of course we always say the people. But the second thing would be that you can feel the Spirit. When you live in the United States, you get so busy with things of the world that you don’t even feel the Spirit a lot of the time. When I left the United States and the rat race we live in, I felt the Spirit so much stronger. And when you’re working on a good cause, Heavenly Father blesses you with knowledge. And you’re working with these sweet, humble people who are just trying against all odds to do what they’re supposed to do and who know the Spirit. People in Ghana talk about their nighttime dreams a lot and I believe they talk about dreams because they can feel the Spirit. Talk about incredible people! I remember one of my American friends in Ghana saying, ““I’m going to go home and wash my ziplock bags and never buy new ones so I can keep the humility that I feel here.””I can’t explain it, but but it’s like being in the temple all the time. I see it in Russia,, too, where we now live while on another assignment. When you go to a country where there are such humble circumstances, you feel the Spirit because it can get through. It’s amazing. You seem to have a positive outlook on life. How do you maintain this? I guess you could say I have been blessed like Nephi: “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents.” I have a mother and father who are just amazing. My sweet mother is a saint; my father is a hoodlum, and I’m more like him. My mother has been a Relief Society president five times and I have never heard her say an unkind word. I remember one time asking my institute teacher, Don Castleton, who had been our bishop, “What can I do to make my life better?” He said, “The best thing you could ever do is look towards your mother. She’s the best example of love and kindness I have ever seen in my whole life. I’ve never met a woman who could love more than your mother.” It doesn’t matter who you talk to, they love my mother. My father, though he’s a hoodlum, is a good man and would do anything for her and anyone else. Their life has been a life of service. I think the way I keep a positive outlook is by trying never to look at myself. Service is my key to staying happy. Sally Miner Murray and Her Family That’s inspiring. Thank you! Is there anything else you’d like to share? Our kids have gone through some hard things in life. People come to us all the time when they start having trouble with their kids, which we all do, and ask how they can help their children. The only thing I can say is to tell your kids that you love them. Very few things have turned out the way I originally planned in my life, but I have found the most important thing you can do as a parent is to love your children and tell them that every day. There will be times you won’t want to say “I love you” and you’ll just think, “How can I love them?” But that is the answer: you have to tell your kids you love them. At some point in life they will come around. I still have some who are coming around. At A Glance Name: Sally Miner Murray Location: Moscow, Russia Age: 59 Marital status: Married for 37 years Children: Six children: 1 daughter and 5 sons Occupation: Homemaker Schools Attended: Borah High School – Boise, ID; Ricks College – Rexburg, ID; Boise State University – Boise, ID Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “I Stand All Amazed” On The Web: http://www.foreveryoung.org/ Interview by Linda Yamamoto.

Although raised on an Idaho potato farm, Rachel Esplin Odell is now a PhD student in International Relations at MIT with a focus on Asian security issues. Her decision to study Chinese and become an expert in Chinese international affairs occurred while she was an undergraduate at Harvard, and Rachel feels a spiritual draw to being a representative of the Church in Chinese affairs. Speaking eloquently of the sacrifices and balances of being in a dual career marriage with her husband, who is also a PhD student, Rachel talks about her desire to contribute to and draw from her home community and parent her 18-month-old son with her husband. You grew up in Blackfoot, Idaho but chose to go to Harvard for college. Would you tell me what prompted that decision? Both of my parents were great examples to me and inspired me to seek as much education as I could get. They taught me to be interested in the world around me and to contribute to the community in which I live. My dad was a potato farmer and my mom, for most of my coming-of-age years, was a stay-at-home mom but did a lot in the community. When I was younger, neither of them had graduated from four-year college at that point, but they had done quite a bit of travel when they were young.Both of them had their Associates degrees from Ricks College. So between my dad’s stories of his mission in Argentina and my mom’s stories from her travel to Europe and Japan in her childhood, I became interested in international affairs. So even though I grew up on a potato farm in Idaho, I did have an interest in learning more about foreign cultures and languages and international affairs. The Esplin Family on Their Potatoe Farm During Spud Harvest When Rachel was 3 Years Old Are you the oldest in your family? No, I have two older siblings and one younger sister. We are quite spread out in age. My older brother was born with a congenital heart defect and had eight open heart surgeries before he was six years old, so my mom devoted her life to taking care of him at that time. But they felt inspired to have another child and I am so glad they did! A cousin of mine had died of the same disease, so there was concern that it was genetic, but neither I nor my younger sister had any problems. My brother is now married and has three kids and he served a mission and is doing really well. But it was definitely a refining experience for my mom and our family. My older siblings were involved in speech and debate and student council, so that got me interested in those same things. When I got into high school I did debate as one of my main activities, and we had several topics that looked at international affairs issues. But all along, I was planning on going to BYU for college. My older sister went to BYU. My older brother went to BYU-Idaho. My parents had gone to Ricks. When I was in junior high, we lost our farm. My mom went back to school with some Department of Labor funding for farmers and their spouses who had lost their farms to go back to school and complete their educations. She earned her Bachelor’s at BYU-Idaho shortly after it became a four-year college. She had done freelance design and photography, so she started teaching adjunct in that field. Then she got her master’s at Boise State in Educational Technology and got a full-time position at BYU-I. That was while I was in junior high and high school. Seeing her do all of that had a big impact on me too. At this point it was just myself and my younger sister living at home, and my mom always did a good job of putting family first and was a great example to me in that regard. She sacrificed sleep to be able to do work and school and family all at once. My dad, meanwhile, continued to support our family through a job as the executive director of Potato Growers of Idaho. They do cooperative bargaining and lobbying efforts on behalf of potato growers. And our countless conversations over the years about international trade and agriculture and politics and religion have played a major role in shaping my worldview and career trajectory as well. So tell me about the adjustment to east coast Ivy League culture coming from a potato farm in Idaho. Was it an adjustment, or did you feel like you fit right in? It was never my plan or goal to go to Harvard. I had always thought that I would want to go to graduate school somewhere outside of BYU, but I was always focused on BYU for my undergrad. But then a series of events right before my senior year convinced me to apply elsewhere too. I was a page in the US House of Representatives and met a lot of kids there who were applying to Ivy League schools. And then I did a debate retreat and we had a guest lecturer who was a professor at American University; he encouraged me to apply to a range of schools as well. So we decided to do a last-minute college tour that fall, and I ended up applying to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and BYU. The summer before I was going to start at Harvard, there were some details of my financial aid package that we still hadn’t sorted out and we thought Harvard wasn’t going to work out financially. So I actually decided to go to BYU. I started at BYU that summer and did a summer term. Halfway through the summer term it was time for me to submit my paperwork to withdraw from Harvard. My mom had a prompting that we needed to call the financial aid office one more time. We called them, and it ultimately worked out, which was definitely a miracle. That experience going to BYU, which I really enjoyed, actually helped a lot in my transition to Harvard because I was able to transition to living away from home but in a familiar culture. That fall at Harvard, academic life in some respects was similar, but then in other ways the culture and the environment was really different. Taking that time at BYU first really helped my transition. Rachel Speaking on the Day of Faith Interfaith Panel at Harvard, September 2008 At Harvard, you chose to study China and Chinese. How did you get interested in Asia specifically? As I mentioned, I’ve always been interested in international affairs. So I “shopped” a class on Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory. The professor was amazing and really engaging, and from the first day really caught my interest. I also took Chinese. Initially I wasn’t planning on becoming a wholesale Asia expert, but I really enjoyed my Chinese classes. Then I studied abroad in Beijing the summer after my freshman year in an intensive language program there. I really enjoyed that, so one thing led to another. I majored in East Asian Studies and did a secondary field in Government. I did an internship at the Office of the US Trade Representative in their China affairs bureau and wrote a senior thesis on China’s behavior in the World Trade Organization. At graduation time, I still wasn’t totally sure that I wanted to do Asian studies as my ultimate career, but I did know that I wanted to be involved in international affairs and use my Chinese. I had gotten married after my junior year of college, when I had one semester left. My husband Scott was going to college at Georgetown, and he moved up to Boston with me and worked during my last semester after we got married. Then we needed to go back to Washington DC because he had a year and a half left at Georgetown. So I had to find a job in Washington DC, but I didn’t really know how to get into the DC job scene. A fellowships tutor recommended this Carnegie Endowment Junior Fellowship, so I applied. It worked out and I got the job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign policy think tank in DC. Rachel and Scott on the Great Wall of Chine, Summer 2009 So that was your first job out of college? Well, sort of. I actually worked for about seven months prior to starting at Carnegie, piecing together income from several different jobs to pay the bills while Scott finished at Georgetown. I did audio transcription, research assistance for a Georgetown professor, Chinese translation, and yardwork for a neighbor. Then I started at Carnegie with essentially a one-year post-baccalaureate fellowship, but it turned into a longer-term research position for me. It’s what I did for the next four years. Then, last fall, my husband and I moved back to Boston, where I started a PhD program in political science at MIT—specifically studying Asian security issues. Now I have a non-resident affiliation with the Carnegie Endowment. I am still doing some projects with them, but my PhD program is my primary focus. Scott and I have had many conversations about the sacrifices we may have to make having dual careers in international relations, especially since we study different places of the world. My husband studies Latin American affairs and environmental issues in the Andean region. I speak some Spanish, so working in Latin America was always a possibility as well. We thought about doing the Peace Corps. But in general we haven’t been able to spend long stretches of time in Asia or Latin America since we got married—more just shorter research and work trips. That’s probably how it will be a lot in our life as we try to spend as much time as possible together and with our family. So what is your husband doing now that you’re at MIT? So this was the miracle of a lifetime. We were able to work it out to both do PhD programs in the same place at the same time. He is doing a PhD in geography at Clark University. He studies the effect of environmental degradation on indigenous groups in Latin America. Clark University has a top ten geography program, so we were really fortunate that we could both get into good programs studying exactly what we wanted to. We just feel like it is an enormous tender mercy how it worked out. Rachel and Scott at Machu Picchu in Peru, Summer 2010 What is your goal after the PhD? Are you going back into research and policy, or do you want to teach? I think that the answer is a combination of both of those things. Scott was also working at a think tank in Washington DC, so we both were in that think tank world studying different regions for the last several years. We appreciated the opportunity to learn more about how the policy process works and contribute to the process in some way, and we would like to be involved in that process in the future, through our research and teaching and consulting. We really loved our time in DC, but it also was a time for us to evaluate if this was the career direction that we wanted. I’ve come to think that in some ways we have a system in modern American society that does a disservice to people like us and to the communities we came from. For me growing up, my teachers and mentors and parents all told me that I could accomplish all of my dreams and I could be successful and do whatever I wanted. So I always felt like I had to reach for the most esteemed position in whatever field I wanted to pursue. Even if it wasn’t conscious, I got on that treadmill to be the best I could be. That’s why I ended up studying China. Because it motivated you to challenge yourself? Yes. Chinese is such a hard language to learn. China is the rising power right now. And so I thought, if you’re going to study international affairs, you’ve got to study China. So I was just following this path. And I really do love it. But when people ask me why I am studying Asia when I grew up on a potato farm, I don’t always know how to answer. In some ways it doesn’t make a lot of sense. We both really enjoy our current work, but Scott grew up in Logan, Utah, and I grew up in Southeast Idaho. Our parents still live back there and most of our family is west of the Mississippi. I think that it’s good to experience the world and other cultures and I’m totally an advocate of that and believe in it. But I do think we have a real “brain drain” problem right here in America. Intellectual and industry centers like Boston and Washington DC pull us away from our friends and family and a life that we could be living closer to our families. I think that there is a tearing of the fabric of the community when that happens. There are so many disconnections in our society because the best and brightest are pulled from high schools all over the country because that is what they think they’re supposed to do. I think it’s valuable to have that exposure and education, but there needs to be more returning back to those home communities, too. I don’t think that there is enough of that. This is something Scott and I have thought a lot about: how we could return and become part of our home community again. Is your desire to return for yourselves and for your family life in the future, or is it to give back to the communities in which you were raised? Or a little of both? It’s definitely both! By no means do we want to leave behind our international training and our degrees. We’re grateful for the path we’re on and we feel like we’ve been led in this direction, which is why we’re pursuing these PhDs. We would like to teach in our fields at universities closer to home and then do relevant policy research. So who knows how it will all work out. We both really love farming and gardening. We would like to have a small farm. We want our kids to be able to be raised closer to their grandparents and cousins, and for us to be closer to our parents as they grow older. As I was growing up, I never thought, “My parents will be old someday and I will need to be around.” But even though I have other siblings who could care for them, I want to be there and I want my children to be there. Because it’s those relationships that matter most in life. Of course, it’s not only our family relationships that matter. Our relationships with all of our brothers and sisters in the world matter. That’s part of what drew me to working in international affairs in the first place. But I think in international affairs, there can be too much of a tendency to prioritize people and issues on some faraway continent while neglecting the people that we interact with in our daily lives and the issues in our home communities. I’ve seen examples in my life that have taught me that you need to be a good, Christ-like person in your interactions with people right around you too, not just on the other side of the world. What has enabled you to get through Harvard and years in Washington and now MIT, with that sort of grounding and perspective? What role has the gospel played in the decisions that you have made on how to craft your life so far? This is actually a piece of the story of why I ended up studying Asia and international relations. Part of it was a simplistic perception, while I was growing up, that China is this great unmissionized portion of the world. You always hear these apocryphal rumors about how missionaries are being allowed into China. I think that was part of what attracted me to it in the beginning. Through reading both secular sources and things that have been said by the apostles, my perspective has changed over the years. Elder Dallin H. Oaks gave a talk called “Getting to Know China” in the 1990s at BYU. One thing he said was a lot of times people ask him, “When is China going to open to the Gospel?” And he tells them that China is already open. It is we who are closed. The Church is present in China. It is growing through a limited amount of proselytizing, family to family, and all very much legal and above the board. I think that I still see myself as being able to play a role in that as a faithful member who is involved in China issues. I think I can have a positive impact on the way the Church is perceived in China and by Chinese officials. We have to realize that missionary work happens differently in different places. I think China is a good example of that. My membership and desire to be a representative of the Church and to get to know other cultures is part of my missionary work. My faith has also played an important role as I have evaluated the trade-offs I have had to make as I got into my career. Having a family is not compatible with certain kinds of foreign policy careers, and so I’ve had to pursue things that make it possible for me to have the kind of family that I want. For example, at one point I decided to turn down an attractive position working on China affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in large part because we felt that it was time for us to have our first child and so the timing just wasn’t right for our family. I think that it’s hard to do everything, to have it all. But that was a positive realization for me. That we have limits in life. That we have to make active choices to do things that will bring us the greatest happiness and bring those we love the greatest happiness. That we have to position ourselves to make a positive contribution to the world, without sacrificing what matters most. Along that theme, tell me a little about your decision to marry while at Harvard. As someone who was dating while an undergraduate at Yale, I know that marrying is not something those college experiences are built to accommodate, and you make sacrifices to marry while there. I felt like I sucked all of the marrow out of my first three years of college, so I didn’t really feel like I missed out on too much by deciding to get married after my junior year. I think that made me feel more comfortable with the decision. I feel like I really made the most of my time at Harvard and I learned a lot and grew a lot. In my sophomore year, I actually called off an engagement. That was a deeply formative choice for me, especially from a spiritual perspective, because I had to learn how to interpret and apply personal revelation in a much more honest way. When I met Scott, my husband, while I was doing my internship in DC, he was very faithful, committed, and obedient but also very supportive of me and my objectives and my goals in life. That was something that I had not always encountered in previous relationships. I think that it just felt right for us, and we both were committed to making things work out. My roommate at Harvard was also LDS and she actually got married a few weeks after we did. So it helped that we were able to support each other in that decision. Having dual careers and a family has been complicated at times, and there have been a lot of points when we didn’t know how it would work out. We have had a lot of difficult conversations where we wondered how we were ever going to do this and balance each other’s sacrifices. But the windows of heaven really have been opened and it’s worked out in ways that have been miraculous. We waited several years to have kids after marrying. We really enjoyed that time together as a couple in DC and getting to know each other better. I think it was very valuable to have that time, just the two of us. But after a while, we started to feel like it was time for us to both move on to graduate school and start growing our family. We knew it was unusual to have children before starting PhD programs. Actually, it’s pretty much unheard of, especially for women! But we wanted to prioritize having children, so we just went ahead with that first. Then when I was admitted to graduate schools, everyone was very supportive and accommodating. I ended up deferring for a year, but that too worked out well since my husband and I were able to start our programs at the same time, because he applied the year after I did. I was also able to work at Carnegie part-time and mostly from home during that year. So we were really fortunate that I had that flexibility both from MIT and Carnegie. How has having a child affected the way you approach your work and family life? Having a child has added a whole new dimension to our lives. It has definitely complicated things! But it has been immensely joyful, beyond anything else I’ve experienced. And it has actually helped me to develop a new level of self-discipline and efficiency. It’s also been such a unifying experience for my husband and me—juggling work and school and caring for our son has taught us more than ever before how to truly work as a team. We’ve been able to afford part-time childcare because we got positions as resident tutors in the undergraduate dorms at Harvard, which covers our room and board. But beyond those 20 or so hours of babysitting each week, we trade off taking care of our son, and then spend Sundays and a couple hours each evening all together as a family. So amidst all of this, we’ve had to learn to be more sensitive to each other’s needs and more willing to make trade-offs to share parenting and work responsibilities evenly and prioritize our time together. It definitely has meant that I can’t always do everything I would have been able to do before, that I often have to just accept that I can’t get everything done that I need to. We’re still learning to balance all of that, but we definitely believe that our Heavenly Parents are helping us figure it out as we go. Which is great, because we figure that if anyone has it figured out, They do. At A Glance Name: Rachel Esplin Odell Location: Cambridge, MA Age: 26 Marital status: Married to Scott D. Odell in the Idaho Falls, Idaho, LDS Temple, July 25, 2009 Children: One awesome 18-month-old toddler Occupation: PhD student in political science at MIT, Nonresident Research Analyst at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Schools Attended: Blackfoot High School (2006), Harvard University (AB 2010), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD, in progress) Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: The Dream Isaiah Saw (Scott and I witnessed this performed first at Georgetown University and then several years in a row at the annual Washington National Chorus Christmas concert. My dream is to hear MOTAB perform it someday.) Interview by Neylan McBaine.

Morgan Lyon Cotti grew up with a mom who worked in politics. These early experience shaped in own future as she stepped into advanced education and made choices about work, marriage, and motherhood, managing the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. She shares her experiences in these areas – and current thoughts on women in politics. You’ve told me that had really great female role models growing up in Bountiful, Utah. Would you tell me about them and the influence that they had on you when you were growing up? My mom, Nancy Lyon, actually had a book club made up of women from our ward. It took in just a couple of streets, but for some reason there were all these really strong women who were also active mothers and very active in their children’s lives. My mom actually went back to work for the Davis School District when I was seven. She had been a teacher before she took a decade off work to raise me and my four siblings. She also decided to run for the state legislature, and she won, she was the first woman ever elected from our district. That was an exciting time in the early 90’s, because the number of women in the legislature was increasing. We had a female attorney general and a female lieutenant governor. More locally to me, my mom’s friends were business women, CPAs, a law professor at BYU. One was an administrator in Granite School District. I am sure my mom and all of these women were drawn together because they had those working lives in common. They were working moms and I’ve noticed a divide in the wards I’ve been in down that line: I don’t think it’s intentional, but the stay-at-home moms go to the park during the day and the working moms can’t do that. My mom also had lots of friends who were stay-at-home moms, but the narrative in my own home was strongly focused on education. My dad constantly was pushing us to math and sciences, although none of us went that route. I have one sister who is a doctor in physical therapy, so she is the closest. My dad had a saying: “Don’t let any door close for you. Focus on your education and get good grades so that you can do what you want.” He often spoke about how one of his biggest regrets was that he didn’t finish his master’s degree, but my mom did. Historically, in my family, I grew up hearing stories about my great-great-great grandmothers. Margaret Cowan had a dream in which she saw butterflies coming from her dress, which inspired her to join the Mormon Church in Ireland and later emigrate with her family. As descendants of that great lady, we all consider ourselves to be “Margaret’s butterflies.” Isabel Bryson, the woman who would later become Margaret’s daughter in law, had the courage to convert, then leave Ireland after a flu epidemic killed her husband and three of her children. She crossed the ocean and plains as a single mother, tragically, by the time she reached Salt Lake both of her remaining children had died. She was one of those midwives who gave blessings. And I always knew those stories. The fact that women gave blessings was never news to me. I always knew it. I had so many strong women in my neighborhood and in my family history that there was never even the thought that I shouldn’t try to be one of those women myself. Were you proud of your mother as you were growing up? Did you ever feel deprived of anything? As a teenager I felt deprived and I knew I was a latchkey kid. I had to get rides to soccer practice and things like that. But I think the benefits of having that strength in my mom far outweighed the challenges. Like I could tell random stories about how I got my driver’s license a day late because my mom was busy at the legislature and my birthday was during the legislative session. So I had little things like that, that I resented at the time. But I have in no way held onto those. It also provided amazing opportunities. Each year on my birthday my mother would take me with her to the Legislature. I got to sit in on meetings and roam the capitol, from a very young age. I recognize that she needed to work for her sanity. I think it made her a better mom and I am really proud of what she has accomplished in the legislature. She is the one who sponsored the marital rape bill in the 90’s. And she did a lot for business and education. She eventually worked as the Vice President of Government Affairs at the University of Utah. She started that job while I was there as a student, so that was always really cool for me. Since she retired she has served two full-time missions with my dad, one in New York City and one in Geneva, Switzerland. Morgan Lyon Cotti And how did you personally balance the narrative you were hearing at home with what you were hearing at Church, that presumably was much more focused on your future life as a mother? I was sassy. I would tell my teachers I would never take my husband’s name when I got married. I am sure they didn’t appreciate that. And then I did take his name. Is that Cotti? Yeah, but I kept Lyon too. Would you describe your interest in political science? I loved political science while I was a student. I’ve always loved history and government. Funny enough, as political as my mom was—and even my dad, who did a lot of government relations stuff as an accountant—I am the only one of the five children who has gone this route. Growing up, I always said I wanted to be a teacher but I never knew at what level. I had a professor who really pushed me to get a master’s and then a PhD and go to an out-of-state school. I was getting engaged at the time and I told him that. He could have told me, “Oh well, focus on that instead,” but he didn’t. He told me to get my master’s in Public Policy at Brigham Young University so I could do both. Moving on in graduate school with a spouse takes a lot of career coordination. We’ve always swapped who was in graduate school, though thankfully now no one is in graduate school! I finished up my undergraduate degree right as we got married. And then as I was working on my master’s, he was finishing up his undergrad. He actually started the MBA program right as I started working. I worked for a few years and then we moved to Washington DC for my PhD right after he finished his MBA. I don’t think we ever sat down and had a conversation where we said, “Okay, now it’s my turn, then your turn, then my turn.” I think it was just always really well understood that we just had to work together on it, and someone will always be the trailing spouse. Sometimes it’s been him; sometimes it’s been me. We have actually swapped out who was the breadwinner in our marriage too, so there is balance there as well. When I applied for my PhD, I didn’t choose any small towns, so that he could have a solid job market. We were very strategic in choosing cities where he could get a job easily, and even choosing cities in which we knew we had connections. I was taking my last class for my doctoral program in the early stages of my pregnancy. On the last day I went to the professor and said, “I have to apologize for my lack of enthusiasm or participation, because I mostly just sit in class and try not to throw up.” He was really nice about it. I had my baby right after I defended my prospectus and my classes were all done. So it actually worked out really well. I was able to be a work-at-home mom and finish the dissertation, and my husband was able to start his insurance business. Tell me about your position at the Hinckley Institute here at the University of Utah? It’s sort of three things. Part of it is the state internship program that I administer. We have three programs. We have state, DC, and global; I do state. A big chunk of my job is a research component. So right now we have three Pew projects, and then I’m also writing a political history/biography of Dan Jones. And part of my job is teaching, so I teach in the Public Policy Program. How old are your kids now? They’re five and two. I work four days a week. I do a lot at night once they’re asleep, and that’s just sort of how I am managing it. I feel like I am really passionate about my work and it doesn’t feel like too much. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t. Let’s talk about the landscape of political involvement in Utah. Tell me your impressions of the heath of the political landscape in Utah as you see it from this job. I am concerned about the health of the political landscape in Utah. I would love to see us have more balance in this state between the parties and between male and female representations. One of my passions is women in politics and voter turnout. But unfortunately, we aren’t doing great on voter turnout either. When it comes to women in politics, everyone is really excited that we have our first black Republican woman elected to Congress, and that she is coming from Utah. But we rank 46th in the number of female representatives in federal government. We lost three women in the House this election, but we gained one in the Senate. So we just are going to be ranked worse now, because we have a net loss of two. That is really concerning to me. Morgan Lyon Cotti and Her Family Why do you think that is? A huge part of it is LDS culture and a huge part of it is the caucus convention system. If you look at the makeup of the delegates at the Republican convention, 75% of them are men. I think that has a huge impact on who is selected. I also think a big part is LDS culture. I myself have heard people say that they think men are better leaders and they wouldn’t trust a woman’s judgment when it came to serious issues like the economy or war. So I think that colors how people vote. That doesn’t say much for our voters. And why is it important to you to have that female representation in all of those bodies? Well, I could be wonky and talk about the research and show how it’s important to have that female voice. I mean, the research shows that groups make different decisions when women are involved. If we were in Relief Society and we were talking about what characteristics women have, we would talk about empathy, a focus on children, etc. In speaking with female legislators, I know that they have tried to push for education and other things and have had a terrible time getting their male counterparts to jump on board with the legislation. It’s often because those men are worried about their male delegates who don’t care about education as much. So I think without women there is a loss on some of those really important issues and a loss of that perspective. I think you find that more with our female politicians, and I think that needs to be in the room. Are there things that you think could be beneficial to solving some of these problems? I think a stronger female voice is crucial. I used to teach in the Young Women and now I am in the older teenager Sunday School. I love the new lessons. I love how it is an open curriculum. But the talks and videos that are listed are usually are of or from men. So I usually have to go searching for a talk or quote by a woman. In my opinion, we are going to have to have some mixture of grassroots efforts and having women be more willing to speak up. And then at the highest level, I hope we will continue to see great changes like the mission age change and the emphasis on women’s voices being included in ward council. What are you doing personally to balance the pressures that you feel being a working mother here in Utah with your own personal conviction that you’re doing the right thing? I think my sister put it best when she said, “You have to identify what is nonsense to you.” A horrifying anecdote about my sister is that when she started as a BYU freshman when she was 17, she had a bishop tell her that she didn’t need to worry about finding a major because her focus needed to be finding a husband. But that didn’t affect her. She told me this a couple of weeks ago, but she said, “I knew what was my truth and that was our home.” We also grew up with a really strong aunt, as well as mother. She didn’t get married until she was 40, and so she had to focus on her career and has had an amazing career. I grew up idolizing her because she traveled the world and had this cool job where she was an interior decorator. She got to work on the historical renovation of the governor’s mansion and I remember her going on cool trips like to Belgium to find lace for the curtains. So like my sister, I have to focus on that truth that is mine, and those relationships with my sisters, my friends, my aunt, and my mother. Morgan Lyon Cotti and Her Family So what closing words would you give to those Young Women you teach? Well, I’m about to teach a lesson about being financially self-sufficient. My husband taught it last year and he focused on budgeting. My sister-in-law in the Bay Area is the Young Women president there and she just did a really cool activity with the girls. She had them each find someone who worked for a living and then someone who works because of a personal passion. I feel like a big part of what I want for my girls is to be able to visualize what they want to do. So I want them to identify people in their lives—whether it be women or men—who have made specific professional choices. And then we will talk about what choices those people made. We are in a blue-collar ward, so it will be interesting to see what kind of examples they bring. I just want them to know that there are many options and so many of them are valid. They should choose things that make them happy and that are smart. If they want to be stay-at-home moms, please be stay at home moms but please get your bachelor’s degree in the process. I recently had a conversation about work and life choices with a friend where she was really emotional about her own path. She got a Master’s degree in the social sciences because she thought it would be good for her family. She has three kids now and volunteers full-time, even though she hasn’t done paid work since her oldest was born. She was saying to me on the phone, “I do exactly according to the messages I have received. You stay at home, you volunteer your little heart out, you put your heart into your calling.” With her youngest in kindergarten, she actually has gone back to work extremely part-time, doing some home visits. But she is still trying to figure out her future and figure out if it’s okay for her to still try to make a career. I told her, “You’ve taken a decade off and that’s how much time my mom took off and how much time a lot of people take off. It will work out.” I think it would be great for her to go back to work, since life is so long. She could have three more decades of a career. I think that’s the conversation. Even at 40 it feels too late, but retirement age is not until you’re 65 or 70. It’s not too late. It’s frustrating that you have to start over, but I run this internship program here at the U of U and I have 60-year-old interns. My friend was the student body president and the star athlete and star student. But in our culture, being ambitious as young women is totally different than being an ambitious woman. She got the message: Do everything you can and be the president of your sorority, but there comes a time in our lives when we are then questioned for our ambitions. I think she realizes now that those messages are conflicted. In the end, we each have to figure out where our truth is. It may sound like a trite cliché, but it is of paramount importance. It helps us weed out the nonsense. I know I have value within my home and community, sadly I don’t always feel that within my home ward. But I know what I feel is true. I know what I love about the gospel, and my knowledge, leadership and other attributes are valued within that space. I know its okay to be smart and ambitious when we are young and also as we mature and enter our careers. I have an amazing legacy of strong women in my family, my goal is to live up to the high standards they set and hopefully bring other women along with me. At A Glance Name: Morgan Lyon Cotti Location: Bountiful, UT Age: 35 Marital status: Married Children: Two children ages 5 and 2 Occupation: State Program Manager at the Hinckley Institute of Politics Schools Attended: University of Utah, Brigham Young University, George Washington University Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: Know This, That Every Soul is Free On The Web: “Feminist Mormon Housewives: Faith of my Mothers” Interview Produced by Neylan McBaine.

Erin Morley has risen to become one of the most celebrated opera singers in the world today. With her four-year-old daughter in tow and often her husband too, Erin travels the world to sing leading roles in the world’s greatest opera houses. In her interview, she talks about her education in voice and opera, the joys and challenges of raising her daughter on the road. and the carefully constructed balance she and her husband have at work to support their busy family life. I was raised in a very musical family. My mom is a wonderful violinist who has played with chamber groups and symphony orchestras (she is currently the concert master of the Salt Lake Symphony and has been for many years), and she also conducts choirs. My dad studied music before going into medicine. He played the trombone and the piano, and later joined the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. In my childhood, my mom taught me violin and piano, and my dad taught me to sing. My sister and I sang a medley of Primary songs in church together when we were quite little. My family made music together every night; music time was how we had fun and how we bonded. We lived in Philadelphia while my dad was in medical school, and so when I was still very young my mom would take me to the Philadelphia Orchestra. She also let me tag along during her own rehearsals, and I learned a lot of chamber music this way. My childhood was full of singing in choirs, acting in plays, playing in orchestras. My siblings and I had so much exposure to the arts and so I grew up with performing in my blood and in my life. Erin Morley as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier (Strauss) at the Metropolitan Opera, 2013. Credit: Cory Weaver I didn’t get serious about performing until I was twelve years old, when we moved to Utah. My parents bought a grand piano, which was really inspirational to me. I spent a lot of time on this piano, and my parents decided it was time to get me a serious piano teacher. I started studying with Solveig Lunde Madsen and really dedicating myself. I wanted to go to Juilliard to study piano, in part because Solveig had studied piano there. I really didn’t think about opera at all until much later. I started studying voice with Betty Jeanne Chipman about a year before graduating from high school. I auditioned at Juilliard, Curtis, and Eastman, for piano. At the very last minute I just sort of decided to throw in a voice audition as well, because I had started getting good at singing, but I had only been studying voice for about seven or eight months. So I was totally shocked when I was accepted as a voice major at Eastman! It was my only acceptance, so it was easy for me to make the decision! I said, “Okay, let’s go for singing!” But it took me a while for me to let go of my piano studies. Erin Morley as Sandrina in La Finta Giardiniera (Mozart) at Opéra de Lille, 2014. Credit: Frédéric Iovino My initial goal when I started as a voice major at Eastman was to eventually become a double major in voice and piano. I studied piano with Douglas Humphreys at Eastman and he was a great teacher. After two years I had to stop because I injured my arms. I developed tendinitis and cubital tunnel syndrome in both arms. I did a lot of therapy to rehabilitate my arms, so I can still play, but not like I used to. I used to accompany my mother in recital, and I accompanied several singers at Eastman; it was hard to let go of it all. I left school for a semester, because I needed some time and space to figure out how I was going to move forward. I spent a semester in Utah until I felt healthy and ready to go back to Eastman. There was really no question of whether I was going to finish my voice degree; it was just a matter of giving myself time to find my focus again. I devoted myself to singing completely after that, and I didn’t look back. I didn’t have any regrets; it was like “Of course! This is what I’m supposed to do!” I’m sure it was all a blessing in disguise; I felt that Heavenly Father was really guiding me and saying, “This is where your career needs to go,” and I was really freed after that point. I felt a burden lifted, in fact. My voice teacher, Carol Webber, was really fantastic at that particular point in my development. She gave me a great foundation in breathing and sound production. But she also helped me with the transition from being a pianist to being a singer. She gave me so many challenges in terms of learning how to express with my face and body, learning how to tell a story, learning how to find my message and deliver it on stage. I learned to love words as an element of expression. I was grateful that Carol was placed in my life to help me navigate that transition. Let’s jump forward a little bit. Tell us where you are in your career today. Did you get here step by step, or did you have a big breakthrough moment? Erin Morley as Adellina (Silberklang) in The Impresario (Mozart) at Santa Fe Opera, 2014. Credit: Ken Howard It really happened step-by-step, and I think this was good. I think it’s important not to skip steps in this career—or maybe in any career—because by the time I went out into the world and started performing all over the world, I was completely ready. That’s my style, but it was also sort of laid out for me that way. Every rung of the ladder seemed to be placed there for me, and it was my job to grab it and go up. After Eastman, I went on to study voice at Juilliard for four years (where I studied with Edith Bers, who has been a huge part of my success and is still my go-to voice teacher), and then to the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development program for 3 years. Opportunities came and I took them. There have certainly been significant moments that propelled me forward. When I sang Sandrina in Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera (at Juilliard), I was invited to sing for James Levine for placement in the Met program. When I sang my first Zerbinetta in Strauss’s Ariande auf Naxos (at Wolf Trap), I was approached by management. When I sang Marguerite de Valois in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (at Bard SummerScape), I received a lot of positive press and subsequent job offers. The role of Marguerite in particular seemed to be when people noticed that I might be a contender in terms of the world scene. If I could pinpoint one career-defining moment, it would be two seasons ago, when I stepped in at the last minute to sing Sophie (in Der Rosenkavalier) at the Met. They called me two days before the opening and said, “You’re on for the whole run.” It was one of the most exciting moments of my career. I felt so much support. My first voice teacher Betty Jeanne had said to me years prior, “You are going to sing Sophie and you’re going to sing her a lot.” This was the first of many Sophies for me; now I’m singing the role in Vienna, in Paris next year, and again at the Met the year following. Let’s turn to your personal life. You are married and you have a daughter. Where did you meet your husband? We knew each other in middle school; we had a lot of classes together and I had a major crush on him! We went to different high schools and different colleges; I didn’t see him for years after middle school. Then when I was home during my semester off from Eastman, I bumped into him again and we reconnected. I was at a concert my mom was giving at the University of Utah. She was soloing with the Salt Lake Symphony. He was there on a date, and I saw him and I talked to him for about thirty seconds, and then he called me the next day. We dated for two years and got married in 2003. Erin Morley as the Nightingale in The Nightingale (Stravinsky) at Santa Fe Opera, 2014. Credit: Ken Howard Long distance? Was he still in Utah that whole time? I was in Utah with him during the summers and for a good amount of time before our wedding, but yes, a lot of it was long-distance. He was going to the University of Utah and finished his degrees around the same time I finished at Eastman. After we got married, I went to Juilliard and he went to Yale Law School. We were very grateful that we both got to attend our dream schools for graduate work. One thing I am curious about: My mother sang at the Met for 18 seasons consecutively. She had a manager and she did some international work, but during that time opera singers didn’t have to work internationally if they were content being house singers. And that doesn’t really exist anymore. Could you talk about the pressures involved with building a career in opera? You have to work internationally now, I assume, if you want to have a major opera career. How have you come to terms with that and how are you balancing all of that? It’s still possible to have a career and be in one place. House singers really do live and work and build their lives in one place. But what I’m doing right now, singing leading roles . . . I really do have to travel for that. Right now while my family is young, traveling is not such a sacrifice. My husband’s job is flexible enough and my daughter is young enough that they are able to travel with me most of the time. How we negotiate things in the future is still to be decided! We take it one step at a time. Tell us about where you are in your career now. So, last year we spent two and a half months in Lille, three weeks in Dijon, a month in Munich, two and a half months in Santa Fe, two months in Paris, then two months in Vienna. We had little breaks in between, but not much. So it was insane this year, full of fun but also so many challenges. It was insane not just because of the travel, but because I was making debuts in top opera houses and singing very difficult roles, some for the first time. I was learning and relearning music like crazy all year. I was very grateful to have my family with me for all but a few weeks of it. Their support is incredible. Does John practice law there in New Haven? Erin Morley and Her Family at a Christmas Market in Vienna, 2014 No, he’s a professor at Yale Law School, so he has a demanding career of his own. This past year he extended his spring break so he could be with us in Europe in the spring, and he took the fall semester off completely, so he was with us in Paris and Vienna. It was really an amazing and rewarding time for our family, but a very busy year for me, and we are certainly learning what our limits are. John works on his research when we’re on the road, so we also travel with our nanny. I love that my family travels with me the majority of the time and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t be a mom and not be present. We have rules in place as a family to make this whole crazy thing work; for instance, we are never apart for longer than three weeks. Our nanny works traditional daytime hours, Monday through Friday, so that we can be a family in the mornings and evenings and on weekends. I also refuse work fairly often because they it doesn’t allow me to meet my family’s needs. I think one has to be willing to do that; otherwise you’ll give up the very things that sustain you. I feel very grateful that I have a situation that works. My husband not only happens to have a career that works with mine, but he also is an actively involved father. One thing I have learned from sad experience is that a singer cannot do her job unless she is well rested. This sort of contradicts everything that we know about motherhood! That’s the hardest part of my career, trying to maintain my health at all times. I have relied so much on my husband to swoop in for me at various times because as soon as I feel I’m about to get sick, he steps in and I am able to recuperate. I want so much to be the kind of mother that mine was, who was really present all the time and took me to see her rehearse and play. I want to share my experiences, joys, and successes with my daughter, and it’s important for her to know what Mommy is doing. She comes with me to rehearsals when possible, or to performances when I feel that I am totally ready and totally calm and I couldn’t possibly be distracted. I am careful to separate my focus on her from my focus on my job, so her presence at rehearsals and performances has to be very smartly navigated. But I believe in exposing my daughter to opera and my workplace and my hope is for her to love what I do and understand why I’m doing it. Where did you find the motivation to pursue this very ambitious career you have chosen for yourself? Erin Morley with Her Daughter Maria, Backstage During a Dress Rehearsal of Rigoletto at the Wiener Staatsoper, 2014. That is a question I get asked a lot. The thing is, I’ve never really had to question my career choice because I just always knew that I was meant to do it. Sometimes I think it would be smart of me to stop, that it would be so much easier for my family. But there are so many things that we are gaining as a family, and the most important of those, I believe, is that I am a better mom when I am singing. I understand that motherhood is my most important work in life, and when I look at my daughter I am very proud of who she has become already. I also believe the best mother is a happy mother. I am happy when I have balanced my personal life and my professional life. I am happy when I am spending equal time and energy on my family and my career. I’ve learned from experience that offsetting the balance in either direction is unhealthy for me and my family. My daughter senses my general frustration and unhappiness when I’m not making music; I love it so much, I feel like a whole person when I’m singing, and she needs me to be a whole person. But when I am stressed out from too much work, that’s not good for her either. I’m still learning how to strike the best balance; truly, that is the goal in my mind when I wake up every day. I don’t think that I was meant to be only a mother or only a singer. I need to be both. And the two occupations complement each other beautifully when the balance is right. I think of my family as a business, and my husband and I are co-owners. We’re managing the thing and we have a lot of help with the details. This provides us with opportunities to spend quality time with our daughter and to have the energy to really be present with her. It’s important that I have an excellent nanny, someone who feels like a little sister to me, someone who I want my daughter to be like. I really feel that Heavenly Father has sent us the nannies we have worked with. I have to feel very strongly about the girls we hire in order to entrust my daughter with them. Erin Morley with Her Daughter Maria, Backstage During a Matinee Performance of Tales of Hoffmann at the Metropolitan Opera, 2015. We have a family mission statement which is “Broaden and Contribute”. (I stole this from a very wise mother, Saren Eyre Loosli of “Power of Moms”, because I loved it so much!) In other words, what we want to focus on building in each other is a greater understanding of the world, and a passion to make it a better place. One thing I have so appreciated about being a member of the LDS Church is that we are continuously grounded by service. We are expected to contribute, to be doers and not just believers, and this we have tried to implement wherever we happen to be in the world. It helps us maintain perspective and more simply, just makes us happier. Most importantly, we pray about every decision we make. Every job that I am offered must be considered carefully. I feel like I can tackle any challenge if it’s part of God’s plans for me! I know that if I receive that confirmation, that feeling that it’s right to accept this work, then my family will be taken care of. With two careers, a child, a home, a traveling schedule, a nanny, housing arrangements abroad . . . there is a lot to manage! But as long as we all remember who we are, stay firmly rooted in our beliefs and our connection to each other, we feel a peace about the situation, and in fact a real purpose in all of our work, professionally and as a family. At A Glance Name: Erin Morley Location: Vienna, currently. Home is New Haven, CT. Age: 34 Marital status: Married in 2003. Children: Maria, age 4. Occupation: Opera singer and mother Schools Attended: Eastman School of Music (BM), The Juilliard School (MM, AD) Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: “Where Can I Turn for Peace?” On The Web: www.erinmorley.com, Facebook and Twitter Interview by Neylan McBaine.

Always a “mother at heart,” Alyson Von Feldt is an organization design consultant, author, speaker, published religious scholar, seminary teacher, and mom of four. She discusses her forays in and out of the workforce, the blessings of scripture study, and how she’s integrated theories from her profession into a more mindful family life. Tell me about your personal and educational background. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where my mom was a high school teacher and my dad was a professor at the University of New Mexico. My mom was a non member, so I grew up with an active father who took me and my sister to church every Sunday. I went to BYU with the full support of my mom, studied philosophy as an undergraduate, and also danced on the ballroom dance team. My last year at BYU, I took some business classes so that I would be prepared for business school and continued on to get a masters in organizational behavior. When I left for an internship between my first and second years of my graduate degree, I had been at BYU for seven years and was not married. My internship was in Richmond, Indiana, and I wrote the story of the innovative organization design at a Colgate-Palmolive plant there. It was a tiny town, about 40,000 people, but I met my husband while we were working at the same plant. He was not a member of the church. We dated that summer and he was warmly fellowshipped by the small ward there and got baptized in October. I went back to BYU for the fall semester and we were married in December in my home in Albuquerque. We were sealed a year from his baptism in the Salt Lake Temple and I finished my last semester of graduate school from Richmond. Alyson Von Feldt What is organization design? My choice to go into organization design was sort of naive. There was one other philosophy student the year ahead of me who had done it and I had a friend in the MBA program who suggested it to me. I didn’t really understand what organization design was until I got into the program, but I knew that it was a field where you were involved in training. So it was kind of felicity that put me there, but then I became very interested in it. Organization design is a methodology for significant organizational change. Those in our discipline help leaders clarify their strategy and then change their organizational structures and work processes. An enterprise might face the challenge of saving money, growing, becoming more efficient, reaching a new type of customer, or launching new products. Organization design is a discipline that helps an enterprise change their organization so they can reach these kinds of goals. We help leaders adjust groups of people who work together and find new ways of doing their work. We might also help them develop new goals or methods of measuring and rewarding their progress. How have you managed to meld your personal and professional lives? It’s funny. I grew up with a working mom and then I went to BYU and always thought that I would have to convince a husband that I should be able to work to some degree. Instead I married a man who had not grown up in the church and did not have the values of a mom staying home with their kids embedded in him. He had a working mom, and oddly I found myself persuading him early in my marriage that I should stay home. He said, “Why you? Why can’t I?” And I said, “Well you’re right. Someone should be home with the kids. Who should it be?” We left that question open until after our oldest child was born and I nabbed the job quick because I wanted it badly. I worked for two or three years before we had our first child, and then I worked part time on and off until we had our third child. After that I thought I was done working forever. My heart wanted to be home with my children. But I had strong ties to the consulting firm I worked with and it was hard to let go. About ten years later, my oldest son had many adventures and we ended up sending him to boarding school. We needed additional income, so I went back to work to help pay for boarding school. Luckily, I had a good education and some experience, so I ramped up my contacts and was able transition back into my career. It actually was really hard to go back to work because technology had changed a lot. For example, when I left, we were using small floppy disks. When I came back even very large files could be transferred through email. Group meetings were set up and rooms for them booked using what I found to be confusing online scheduling systems. But I just kind of eased into it and figured it out. Alyson Von Feldt and Her Husband What has your career path looked like since then, transitioning in and out of the workforce? That is constantly changing throughout my career. Sometimes I have worked at home part time to full time involved in developing training materials or writing books with other authors. Other times I have worked out of town for months at a time for five days a week. That worked better when my husband was working locally. Right now I am not working at all by choice. Instead I really like to be here for the kids. I’m exploring some professional interests in new ways to apply organizational design. My husband is a full time consultant as of about two years ago and it really can’t work for both of us to travel. When I was traveling and the kids were pre-teens and teenagers, he worked full time near home. My parents lived with us but couldn’t drive. So there wasn’t a family member who could get the kids to any of their activities after school. We often hired young couples from our ward to help get them to ballet and piano lessons. My husband was here in the morning and would usually be home in time to make dinner and handle the night stuff. With a few hours’ help in the afternoon, we could make things work pretty well. How do you decide which opportunities to pursue? It’s just taking one opportunity at a time, working with my family, as we do with their opportunities, deciding whether we feel it fits in and will be a fun challenge that we can adapt to or will over tax us. That way we make deliberate family choices as they seem wise. We have tried to always follow the spirit to make choices about how much I worked to meet financial needs or challenges or goals. I’ve been hugely blessed because the leaders of the consulting firms I work with have always been glad to put my talents to use when I want to work yet graciously let me move into part time work or work from home or even take a hiatus when I want to so I can put more into my family. These colleagues are all men and strong members of the church and they could not have been more supportive of my contribution and my aspirations because they are constantly changing. I cannot say enough good things about these men and their flexibility and how much our family has been blessed because of that. What is the most interesting or challenging project you have worked on? A couple of years ago, my husband decided to launch his own consulting practice, which he had wanted to do for a long time. So he left his full time job. At the same time, I had an opportunity to work on a very intense organizational design out of state and eventually spent six or seven months on it. After two months, the consulting firm I worked with needed a little more help on the project so they were one of my husband’s first clients and contracted with him to join the effort. So both of us were on the project together, but it was out of town every day for months at a time. After discussing the situation, we moved our entire family to North Carolina for six months. It was incredibly interesting on many fronts. Our deal with the kids was that we were going to try to treat it as a long vacation since they were willing to move and leave all their friends behind. Luckily we found a rental house on a lake, so we found kayaks on Craigslist and tried to spend a lot of time on the water. It was a challenge that could have been really stressful for our family, but we tried to parlay it into one of our funnest experiences. Because we left everything behind and both my husband and I were working, we minimized the kids’ extracurricular activities. They even called me to teach seminary there. Since one of my daughters was old enough to attend, she was already going anyway so it was less overwhelming to the family at this intense period because it was a way for us to spend time together. Our life in a rental house became pared down to its very simplest. Our callings were very focused to where we were doing them with the kids instead of doing separate things. It was a blissful time in our lives. Professionally, the organization we were doing the consulting for was going through a total overhaul of their strategy and needed extensive organizational redesign. It was really fun to be a part of such a dedicated effort on behalf of this business and to meet many talented and bright leaders who were excited by the challenge. It was also fun because I was working with my husband. Alyson Von Feldt How do you implement the principles of organization design into your own life? My husband is now a consultant in the same field as I. We have doctored into our family discussions some of the concepts that we use when designing larger organizations. We talk about how some activities are vital and we would never want to trade off the regularity with which we do those activities. Like church attendance and family prayer. For example, right now he travels four or five days a week but he always calls every morning at 7:15 and we have family prayer. And then we talk about other activities that we recognize as less vital to our well-being. Sometimes we avoid them but sometimes the spirit guides us to just say yes for a season when we think they won’t take away from our vital activities. An example of that is for two years I chaired the BYU alumni chapter in Kansas City. Another example is from a couple of years ago, when my coauthor and I needed to buckle down and finish our book on Bronco Mendenhall, the BYU football coach. We were writing about how he implemented values and principles of organization design with his team. I was working at home, but I knew I needed to spend long hours each day at the computer in order to get it done. So we gathered the kids around the table and wrote all of my family responsibilities on sticky notes. Then we dealt out those sticky notes to family members. Some of them we decided I would keep, like putting my youngest son to bed or tracking the family finances because that’s kind of my niche in the family. But other family members volunteered for things like making dinner and doing the laundry. My teenagers set up a schedule where they took turns making dinner. They gave my husband their meal plans on Saturday and then he bought groceries and he and the teenagers would take turns making dinner. This went on for five to six months and they had so much fun planning meals, cooking them, and serving them to our family. Sometimes it was hot dogs or tomato soup and others times it was a gourmet feast. They were awesome sports and I think we all learned a lot about flexibility, how to serve each other, and accommodating one family member who has a need. We were really blessed because we finally finished the book. That’s the kind of method we have used to have conversations about work and roles and responsibilities in our family. My husband and I have so much fun doing this. We have seen the success of our consulting methods in the business world and we have tried to apply them to our family and it’s helping us. I have a colleague who is particularly interested in doing the same thing. He and his wife are working on applying these organization design methods in their family. And we started to talk about it a little bit and so my colleague and I are joining forces and we are working on a workshop to share these ideas. All parents want to use their time with their families wisely. We sometimes get caught up in activities and routines that make us feel stressed and disconnected instead of enriched and close. So we think maybe there are ways to think through the intentional design of a family that can lead to a more purposeful family life. So that’s capturing my interest right now. It’s great to think about because it brings together my interest in being a mother with my professional expertise and what works best. You also teach seminary. How does that fit in? I love teaching seminary, but it’s not without its challenges. Several years ago I started waking up really early in the morning and that was before I got the calling, so it’s not hard for me to get up early. Last year I was going with my two daughters to seminary every morning so it was literally a family activity. Now one of them has graduated but I still go with my other daughter every morning and it’s such a sweet experience to be with her. I love it also because it vastly helps my understanding of the scriptures, being in the position that I need to teach them to others. I love the students I teach. It’s worked out perfectly because I am home just about the time my youngest son is getting up so he never feels my absence in the morning. The relentless nature of preparing a lesson every day is the biggest challenge for me, but I’ve felt like I needed to learn to devote the right amount of time to it. You can easily spend four hours a day preparing for seminary, but I have tried to teach myself that that would interfere with the vital activities of our family. Serving in my calling is important for my spiritual growth but over preparing doesn’t serve anybody. So I have tried to put my faith in the Lord and in the spirit and the manuals available from the church. Lots of times I prepare while I am waiting for my son at martial arts lessons or cub scouts. I try to multi task and it’s worked out great. Someone applied the parable of the loaves and the fishes to this type of situation. You bring your loaves and the Savior takes them and multiplies them to the quantity that you need. So I give my hour or two and I have to trust the spirit to multiply that to meet the needs of the seminary students who I am praying for and thinking of as I prepare. With that attitude I feel like I can offer my humble offering and it will be enough because it will be magnified by the Savior and the Spirit. How did you get into religious scholarship? Years ago when I was a new mother, I was studying the topic of revelation. I was in D&C 76 and I followed a cross reference which took me to the book of Proverbs and I read the first dozen or so chapters as if for the first time. When I came to Proverbs 8:22-31, I read about a woman named Wisdom speaking in that poem and had a significant spiritual experience. One of the most profound of my entire life. I felt like the top of my head was opened up and light and understanding poured into it. I read in this poem about a heavenly woman named Wisdom who was present at creation and I could not believe that I had never noticed her there before nor had anyone ever called her to my attention at church or in my religion classes. It just seemed to me plain as day that a divine woman was telling her story in that poem. I remember standing up in astonishment because I always wondered why the scriptures never mention a heavenly woman of any sort. Not an angel who is a woman, not a heavenly mother, not a single noble and great female intelligence performing a heavenly role. Of course there are many great strong, mortal women in the scriptures, but here was what appeared to be a heavenly woman speaking in her own voice, plain as day. Later, as I read up on this passage, I was disappointed that I could find almost no commentary by either church leaders or LDS scholars. I was just nuts to learn more about her. It was like I had looked down a long tunnel and I had seen her in the opening on the other side and I went running down the tunnel so I could meet her. But when I got to that other side I could not find her anywhere. So after that I just was driven and passionate about learning more about this Wisdom woman. Alyson Von Feldt How does this idea of the divine feminine affect how you see yourself or how women should see themselves? In the Wisdom poem in Proverbs 8, this woman stands beside God as he creates the world. Different translations treat it differently, but she rejoices as he does it, she is dancing before him, she is clearly anticipating the advent of mankind on Earth. She is interested and involved and enthusiastic about mankind. She loves us exuberantly. It makes me love her. I suppose the implications are about our roles as exalted women. That we can see our place in the heavens with other divine women who are with God. We have a place there that we are returning to, from which we came mothered by a heavenly mother and where perhaps some of us were great and noble intelligences, involved as Wisdom was in the creation and in the care and nurturing of God’s children. These women are our sisters here on Earth and they will also be exalted and become heavenly women. To some degree we can see the great Lady Wisdom in ourselves. When I was pregnant with my first child, I was dreadfully sick all day long and it floored me because I thought it was mind over matter and you could work when you were pregnant. But I could hardly get out of bed. I had to stop consulting. I couldn’t cook. I couldn’t even read. Going to the bathroom was an ordeal. I had to gear up mentally to do it because I was so sick. At the time I was reading (when I could) perspectives about the female persona. One female author suggested that women are tied by their natures to the earth. As depicted in world literature and art, men are more up in their heads and up in the sky creating, championing, and executing their ideas. But for women, it’s their physical nature and fertility that is often emphasized. At the time it struck me because I recognized for the first time how much my physical nature was a part of my identity. I had been wrapped up in my head and my ideas through school and my early career and thought that I could accomplish anything with my intellect and the support of family members. But my body shut me down when I was pregnant. I was delighted to be pregnant, but it was a little depressing at the time because my identity was a little shaken by the inescapable demands of my physical body. I wrote a poem wondering what it would be like to be a heavenly woman. Here on earth, we are constantly engaged in a monthly cycle of physical and hormonal and emotional changes. We undergo so many physical changes when we have children and there are so many physical demands on us. I thought, “What would it be like to be a heavenly woman when you aren’t tied to the cycles of the moon and of blood and earthly child-bearing?” Of course that is very philosophical. I don’t know the answer, but it was amazing to see a heavenly woman in the scriptures talking about herself in her own voice, and it was the voice of a woman in ebullient anticipation of the creation and its promise for humankind. I think that a lot of women believe that they aren’t scriptorians. What advice would you give to women about that? I would give the advice that Wisdom gives in Proverbs. She is depicted in Proverbs 1 as standing in the public places of the city and calling to people to come to her. She says I will pour out my spirit unto you and I will make my words known unto you. She is disappointed to find that many refuse her or disregard her and would have none of her council. I think if we just hearken to the invitation to study the scriptures that the spirit will be poured out upon us and we will understand things that we weren’t even searching for. Like when I was reading about revelation and all of a sudden I saw divine woman speaking in her own voice. I think that is the kind of mystery and knowledge and wisdom that our father in heaven has for us if we will open the scriptures and search and pray and study. If we can just take those steps I think that Wisdom will help us, if you will. The spirit will help us to see things that will excite us and drive us to greater understanding and cause us to eagerly turn to the scriptures and read them in search of more. What role in your life do you identify with the most? I think of myself as a mother and a wife. It’s the role I prefer to be in. Certainly, I feel blessed to be free to pursue my intellectual interests. When we first got married, my husband felt strongly that I should use those first years after I graduated to develop my talents outside the home so that I was experienced and could serve other people better. He turned out to be right because we needed my contribution financially later. I was able to co-author some books, and in so doing, perform service to co-authors who were friends and mentors and whose stories and ideas I very much wanted to share. When I have written about the scriptures, it was because I felt like I couldn’t rest until I put down the thoughts that had come to me on paper. I feel blessed that some of those things have been published because then there are more brains and spirits coming to the conversation. But all that doesn’t necessarily comprise the core of my identity. I have at times been a professional woman, either because it could help my family or there are certain things that I felt the Lord wanted me to do. But even when I am working at home, I hate feeling torn between the two spheres, and I do! No doubt, when I am working away from home I can get super into it and forget about my family for a day or two at a time. It really can slip away very quickly and I don’t like that. I don’t like when I work from home on a deadline and I have a child asking me for something because I really want to help the child without being distracted by anything else. I don’t want to glorify my life. I’m lucky to be able to move so easily in and out of the workforce. I can’t imagine greater ease of doing so, but that doesn’t mean that I like straddling the two worlds. Overall, I just have a personal preference to be home with my kids so I can give them my fullest attention. Alyson Von Feldt and Her Family At A Glance Name: Alyson Von Feldt Location: Lawrence, KS Age: 48 Marital status: Married Children: Jacob (20), Sophie (18), Meredith (16), Aidan (10) Occupation: Stay-at-home Mom, Organization Design Consultant, Writer Schools Attended: Brigham Young University Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: Abide with Me, Be Still my Soul, O My Father Interview by Nollie Haws.

Heather Staker is the founder and president of Ready to Blend. She speaks and trains about blended learning, which is any formal education program that combines brick-and-mortar schooling with online learning. She also co-founded and helps produce “Brain Chase,” an online-learning program for 2nd-8th grade students that involves a worldwide hunt for buried treasures. In this interview she talks about the experiences that helped shape her professional interest in improving schools, how she’s felt “quickened” in her efforts to balance motherhood and career pursuits, and her views on the need for a nuanced approach to screen time for kids. What sparked your interest in educational issues? I grew up in Orange County, California, the second of seven children. My parents were proactive, hands- on parents who worked hard to build our family. During 11th grade, my English teacher posted applications for all sorts of scholarships and I filled out nearly every one, including an application to be the student member of the California State Board of Education. Each year, California appoints one high school senior to serve on its 11-person board. The student member spends a week each month in Sacramento, as well other time traveling around the state to visit schools and programs. I filled out the application and one thing led to another. Soon the State Board of Education met with me, followed by Governor Pete Wilson’s appointment secretary. Then I appeared before the California senate, which approved my nomination. So as a 17-year-old I gained unusual exposure to state government and the public school system. The experience was transformative. Seeing point blank the diverse needs of millions of children gave me more empathy, even anxiety, for their varied challenges and hardships. And I left wanting to do more. A one-year term is short, particularly given the demanding learning curve. I resolved then to return to education someday and make a more significant contribution. Where did you go from there? The State Board of Education opportunity helped me get into Harvard, where I concentrated in Government and continued to study public policy. After college I took a sales job with Proctor and Gamble. Six months in, a recruiter for Harvard Business School (HBS) contacted me. He said there weren’t enough women at HBS at the time and that the school wanted to recruit younger women who evidenced leadership ability to see if that strategy would reduce the gender gap. So I applied, and at 22 became the youngest person at HBS that year. Two years later, I moved to Los Angeles, where I took a job as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Company. I was still single all this time. Heather Staker How did the training you received in your MBA and at McKinsey (a top management consulting firm) prepare you for subsequent career opportunities? HBS does two things very well. It promotes the ability to go through case-study data, make decisions based on the data, and then defend the position. It’s also a really social place, so that personal and professional network has proven invaluable to me over the long term. Of any professional experience I have had, McKinsey was the most instrumental in helping me learn to think clearly, organize information, and communicate it in compelling ways to an audience. Working for McKinsey was grueling for the most part, but also indispensable for helping to prepare me mentally for several jobs down the road. Meanwhile, I met Allan Staker, to whom I was immediately attracted, but we were in such different places personally. I was working long hours and traveling each week. I decided that this relationship was really important to me and that I needed to find a way to give it a fair shot. I left McKinsey to work for one of my clients so that my hours would be more reasonable and I could date Allan. We got married eight months later! Then doctors told me that it was unlikely I would ever have children. But I was fortunate to give birth to our first son a year after our marriage. Heather Staker and One of Her Children You now have five children, 12 years old and under. How did your career fit in while having kids? I have tried everything in terms of career/mother balance. I have not worked at all, worked a little during naptimes, and at times been the sole provider for our family. Allan is the most creative, entrepreneurial soul I have ever met. The day we got back from our honeymoon he quit his job and decided he wanted to invent an Xbox game. So I provided for us for a year while he conceptualized and figured out how to commercialize this invention. When our son was born, I left the company I was working for, and we took turns caring for Tate so that Allan could continue to build up the product development, marketing, and creative aspects of the business. I managed the finances and business planning. Building that company together was an interesting start to our marriage because we discovered each other’s professional strengths and weaknesses—an unusual dimension to add to a relationship! Through so many investor presentations and other meetings together, we learned to cover for each other. We took our son with us everywhere. Often we found a friend in the city that we could leave him with while we went to a quick meeting together, or we just brought him along. It was very much a joint venture between Allan, me, and baby Tate to launch that company. Heather Staker and Her Family How did you get from there back into the education sector? We sold all of the assets from that company to a toy company in New York City and my husband decided that he wanted to go to business school as well. So we went back to HBS for what were my seventh and eighth years in Cambridge. But this time I was the spouse, driving a minivan and living in student housing with three children and a fourth on the way. I took a part-time job as a teaching fellow for Professor Roger Porter’s American Presidency course at Harvard College. I loved the chance to be back in Harvard Yard and found great joy in changing gears from caring for toddlers to focus on teaching and study. I learned that the ten hours or so of teaching time each week provided just the balance I needed at the time. When Allan graduated in 2009, the housing market tanked and employment was a disaster. Eventually he found a job with Hawaiian Airlines and we moved to Honolulu when Henry, our fourth child, was four weeks old. We soon discovered that Hawaii is an extremely expensive place to live, particularly with our mountain of student debt. Needing to help support our family, I reached out to Clayton Christensen, a professor whom I greatly admire at HBS whose work focuses on how to help organizations innovate. His think tank, the Christensen Institute, offered me a research position within its education practice, and that is where I began writing about blended learning. I found peace in returning to the tough problems that had perplexed me as a student on the State Board of Education and seeing them now through the lens of innovation. It turns out that America has time and again innovated itself out of dead ends and broken models. The same can be true for our schools. On the personal side, working for the Christensen Institute proved ideal for my circumstances. I have found that the single most important factor to allow me to be in effect a full-time professional and a full-time mother is extreme flexibility. I need to be able to work at night, early dawn, standing on my head, and dancing in circles, if necessary, without the client batting an eye, so long as I deliver above and beyond on my assignments. So that was my agreement with the Institute, and they really held to it, much to their credit. With the publication of Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools, which I co-authored with Michael Horn, I stepped aside from my day-to-day work with the Institute. That gave me time to set up Ready to Blend, a consulting group that provides training to schools on blended learning, and to assist with the production of Brain Chase learning challenges. Heather Staker How do you organize your support system and time to manage your family and career responsibilities? A few things have been important to me in navigating these years with five young children. One is that I learned that getting paid by the hour is crucial because it monetizes my time. Rather than taking a salary, I try to get paid by the minute so that every moment counts. I’ve also always worked remotely so that there is no face-time requirement and I can work whenever opportunities arise throughout the week. I’ve also accepted that there is a real trade off when you’re trying to do both, in terms of giving enough time both to kids and to work. For me, the sacrifice comes in my social life and discretionary time. But for the past several years, that’s a tradeoff that I have been willing to accept because I’ve felt committed to being present with my children. So I admit I’ve put my social life and free time on the altar. In that sense, I don’t think it’s for everyone. It really is a tradeoff and you can’t have everything—there’s not an easy answer, unfortunately! Usually I have a part-time nanny or preschool that provides childcare for 12 hours a week and then I do overflow work in the evenings and weekends. I wrote almost every word of Blended in the middle of the night. Several times a month I take a 24-hour trip to do a presentation or deliver a workshop. I can almost always do it within 24 hours. I take the last flight out, deliver the training or presentation in the morning, and fly back immediately. We have a really elaborate system in place of the babysitter combined with my husband for making that work. My theory is that there are four jobs that moms do. One is to provide physical care—supervision, healthy meals, clean clothes—the custodial stuff. The second is to help them thrive in school and extracurricular activities by being prepared and organized. The third is to love them unconditionally. The fourth is to teach them moral principles and help them find their spiritual footing. With careful organization, I can get those first two jobs done pretty well even when I travel. The third and fourth are hard to delegate, which is why it’s super troubling to all of us if I travel too much. Every woman’s life is different. I believe that it’s possible to get spiritual direction in life through prayer and that there is a God who provides personal guidance relative to the individual course that is best for each one of us. Because of that we have to assume that each person is heeding the inspiration that is right for her life and circumstances and that no two women are going to follow the exact same pattern. I am grateful that in seeking to align my life to a divine will, my path has emerged as more demanding and interesting than I imagined originally. I have simple faith that I am the spiritual daughter of God and that, when I attune myself to the quiet, spiritual, lovely impressions that are available to all mortal travelers, I can find personalized direction, confidence, and peace. Heather Staker with 2 of Her Children How do you find time to nurture yourself? To be honest, it’s a tightrope. I am still trying to figure out two things: social life and self-care. Those are the two places that I come up short the most often. I love exercise. It’s a huge stress relief. I try to get up in the morning before the kids and exercise, but inevitably the kids wake up throughout the night or I stayed up late working on a project and it just doesn’t happen. I used to be in peak shape and now I am fine, but not performance ready. I used to run marathons and now it’s a four-mile loop. My body sends signals, and when my emotions start to turn dark, I pull back and take a nap and regroup. I actually feel that one of the benefits that I can provide doing this interview is being honest and saying for women who want to have it all, there are sacrifices inevitably, and for men too. We are lucky to live when there are a lot of options, but time is the great scarcity of the developed world. Are there any specific instances where you felt particularly guided to take or not take a specific path? When I was 21 I thought about serving an LDS mission. At the time women had to be 21, so that was my junior year of college at Harvard. I followed the practice of praying to get an answer about whether or not that was my calling. I felt strongly that I was not to go—and I was surprised! Looking back and seeing the opportunities I had to go straight on to business school and to get married and start a family right away, it makes more sense. One of the principles of my religion that I feel the most committed to is the idea that heaven is willing to fortify and strengthen us and help us in the details of our lives. I love the verse in the book of Isaiah where the Savior says to fear not, I am with you, I will strengthen you, I will help you. As I think back on the countless nights I spent working because I felt that my children were my top daytime priority, I remember feeling so strengthened. I believe that we all have a Savior who can quicken us as we are trying to live as best we can and make the choices that are most aligned to our beliefs. What do you hope your children learn from your experiences and by seeing your example? That God delights in human happiness. To discover their own capacity for love and joy-filled relationships. That they have a mother who showed them life is abundant and was compassionate and committed, even when she was tired. To have enthusiasm for the variety of options in the abundant and beautiful lives they are given. Tell us about your work with blended learning. Most schools have had computers and technology for decades. So why isn’t it making a difference? Blended learning is not about cramming more computers into schools. It’s about an intentional shift away from teacher-driven instruction toward online learning to give students control over the pace that they work, the path that they take, and the time that they work. That level of student control and agency has not been possible for schools, until now. That’s why online learning is revolutionary. It opens vast new opportunities for students to drive their own learning, experience a more customized path, and learn important skills that the traditional classroom’s passive approach is unable to deliver. My favorite assignment is to meet with teams of teachers and administrators and expose them to this new paradigm through a workshop experience that itself is blended. I do some of the instruction, but other parts are online, or small group, or project based. They move on as they master the content. Even for adults, the increased engagement, choice, and movement in a blended model are a big relief compared to the structure of the traditional workshops and meetings that they usually attend. Heather Staker Are you naturally comfortable speaking in groups or how have you prepared to do that? I have worked on it a lot! I was horrible at first, but I’ve become better. I really love the moments when I can tell an idea clicks and I’ve made a difference for someone. Heather Staker How do you implement your research on blended learning into your children’s education? When we were living in Hawaii and I first began writing about blended learning, I interviewed Jeff Sandefer, the co-founder of a school network based in Austin, Texas, called Acton Academy. I was so enamored by its mix of self-paced online learning with rich hands-on projects and face-to-face discussion that I told my husband we simply had to move 3,700 miles so our kids could attend that school! Sure enough, we did. We didn’t know that by moving to Acton Academy we were making a long-term decision about our children’s education. We have found, however, that once our children experienced the ownership and freedom that come with student-driven learning, it would be hard to put them back into a more traditional Industrial-era classroom. Liberty can be ennobling. Acton Academy is masterful at equipping children with the principles and powers they need to manage their own learning, and then setting them free. We’re lifers at this point. Do you do anything special educationally at home? When our children have free time and want to get ahead academically, they can log in to their Chromebooks and make progress at home. When they get back to school, all the progress has accrued to their account that’s stored in the cloud. Also the oldest four all participate in Brain Chase each summer, which is fun to do as a family and has advanced them well above grade level in reading, math, and writing. Of course all the research shows that family dinnertime and lots of reading to kids are hugely important practices, so we’re committed to those too. The way I think about screen time is that there are online super foods—the online destinations that are deeply informative and beautifully designed in step with the best learning science. We use many of these for Brain Chase—Rosetta Stone, Khan Academy, Dreambox, edX, virtual museum tours—those sorts of sites. Then there are the online empty calories—the Netflix Kids channel comes to mind. And then there is just pure poison. So when parents think they have to limit screen time, that’s too broad. Parents need to be more nuanced in their thinking and separate the food from the filth. It’s an amazing era to be a part of, as we have these resources. I’m not scared of them. In fact, I think they are catalyzing the greatest revolution in learning and expansion of knowledge the world has known. I love being a part of it. Heather Staker and Her Family At A Glance Name: Heather Staker Location: Austin, TX Age: 39 Marital status: Married Children: 5 Occupation: Speaker, Trainer, and Author Schools Attended: Harvard College / Harvard Business School Languages Spoken at Home: English Favorite Hymn: For All the Saints On The Web: readytoblend.com & brainchase.com Interview by Nollie Haws.

Catherine Ramirez is a professional flutist and teacher whose music has been described as spiritual, elegant, acrobatic, and earthy. When she speaks about her musical achievements, she’s modest. But when you hear her play, her passion is hard to hide. She shares how her Latino heritage influences her perspective and performances, and how we can all learn lessons from music when we stop to listen. Tell me about your spiritual journey. I grew up Catholic. My family attended mass every Sunday. But in college, I drifted away from the church and explored other religions, including Buddhism. I also explored the Unitarian Universalist Church. I believed in God and Jesus Christ, but I felt a need to explore. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I was just following whatever it was that was moving me to explore. Catherine Ramirez On a summer day in 2002, while a graduate student at Yale University, I got an email from a high school friend from Texas who said she had seen my riding my bike around New Haven, and invited me to church. I had always admired her and her family. I went to church with her in August 2002 and was baptized in December 2002. When I joined the church, it was hard for my family to accept, but they eventually saw that it was a good thing for me. My mom, sister, and I have had spiritual conversations and there is a lot of alignment. We respect and love each other. When did you begin playing the flute? And what made you decide to pursue it as a profession? I started playing the flute when I was 12 through the public school band program in Texas. Honestly, I started playing because of a cute guy in band [she laughs]. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I took private flute lessons. It came easily for me. I’ve always loved the wonderful energy of making music with others. I went on to get a bachelor’s in flute performance from Occidental College in Los Angeles. In between my junior and senior year, I enrolled in a summer course in France with a really great French teacher, Christian Lardé, and audited a class from Italian teacher Marzio Conti. There was something about Marzio that was so inspiring. When he talked about the music, it was like he was dancing. As musicians, we often get so detailed but we mustn’t forget that music is an abstract art. There’s this energy and motion through sound that’s so important to keep in touch with. And Marzio was filled with this love and passion and movement for music. Because of that experience, I applied for grants to go to Italy to learn from Marzio but nothing worked out. So, after working two jobs during the summer and getting a generous donation from my brother and dad, I was able to go to Italy for a year after college and take an accelerated course with Marzio. After Italy, I completed a master’s in music from Queen’s College in New York and from Yale. I freelanced for five years, playing with several orchestras, performing lots of chamber music, doing solo recitals, masterclasses, and teaching traditional and Suzuki flute lessons, as well as auditioning and coming close to winning several jobs, before I decided to do my doctorate at Rice University. How would you describe your style as an artist/musician? My first flute teacher once said that my flute artistry is “conversational.” I really like that. I try to have a conversation with other musicians and with the audience through music. I’m most interested in the energy flow part of the conversation though. Depending on the music being performed, sometimes that energy is really easily received. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable or difficult to receive because what the music might be saying is so true — kind of like a glowing red-hot sword piercing our misconceptions, our weaknesses, our biases — and inciting us to change or acknowledge something within ourselves that’s hard to face, and yet, still giving us the courage to face it. I believe music has that kind of power. If we really listen, it really does have the power to change our lives. Is there a particular composer that moves you? In some way or another, all music is an expression of what it means to be human. There are some days when Mahler is medicine for me, or Christian rock, or Ravel, or blues, or jazz. Or Bach — give me some Bach any day. And Mozart, of course. I just came from a Mozart concert. It depends on my mood or whatever I happen to be falling in love with. There’s room for all of it. How do you stay disciplined in your music performance? It’s true what they say — if you don’t use it, you lose it. If you don’t practice, your skills evaporate. When I practice every day with a proper warmup, especially after not playing for a few days, I can feel the power come back into my fingers. I’m more sensitive and aware of my body — I can command the air and expand within myself. It all starts to come back. I want to keep improving to become the best musician I can possibly be—to share my music with others. Performing is who I am. If I don’t do that, I don’t feel like myself. Performing feeds my teaching. In my teaching, I try to help a student access the music to ultimately comfort, inspire, or give hope to others. The professor has to be just as teachable as the student. I ask lots of questions when I teach. I want to know what the student is experiencing so I can help guide them. Without that information, I don’t know how to help a student. There has to be dialogue. I learn just as much about playing from my students and the struggles they’re having. I also see general human qualities — the beginner learning for the first time, the intermediate student who knows something already but may have doubts and difficulties. The teacher lays a foundation to work through these obstacles. Catherine Ramirez What are some of your most memorable experiences performing? There ought to be a special feeling for every performance.In one particular moment in my New York recital debut, during Toru Takemitsu’s “Voice for Solo Flutist,” I took a risk and went for a much softer dynamic and I remember feeling this immediate connection with the audience. They could sense me taking a risk and were in it with me. That moment was really powerful. Another moment was while playing a movement from a concerto with the St. Olaf Orchestra in the Xi’an Concert Hall in China, I thought of the terra-cotta warriors and the ancient history that surrounded us, which was so humbling. Another memorable performance for me was playing at a small convent in Bogota, Colombia, where my mom was born. It was just me and my pianist friend, my family, nine nuns, and a plate of cookies in a small common room with an upright piano. There was a beautiful feeling there. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I recently played Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Gabrieli Consort Singers. It was an intense experience play this three-hour masterpiece with fantastic musicians in a beautiful new concert hall to a full house. I was seated near the front of the stage and remember a young man in the front row having a hard time sitting still and being quiet. Even though I could only see him out of the corner of my eye, I decided to play only for him for a moment, as if to say, it’s okay, here’s some music just for you. At intermission, I saw this young man had Down syndrome. I was glad to have offered this music to him, and hoped that he could feel that beauty as well. When you played in Bogota, did you feel connected to your roots? Do you feel like that latin influence inspires some of your playing? I love Bogotá — the people, the food, the nature, and the smell of the city, especially the smell of bread around the corner from my grandmother’s house. Colombia is part of who I am. I’m also American and Mexican American. All of this is part of me and it all influences my playing. It’s not just that certain rhythms feel as though they’re in my blood, but it’s a perspective from where I see the world. What’s your favorite scripture? I have two. Alma 32:27: “Exercise a particle of faith, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe…” And D&C 123:17: “Let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed.” Catherine Ramirez What advice would you give to women who are interested in the arts? Trust yourself. Believe in your dreams and proceed with as much faith and diligence as you can. Pray for guidance and express your gratitude for all the help you receive along the way. At a Glance Name: Catherine Ramirez Location: Northfield, Minnesota Occupation: Assistant Professor of Music, St. Olaf College Website: http://www.catherineramirez.com Education: Occidental College (BA), Boccherini Music Institute in Italy (Honors Diploma), Queens College (MA), Yale University (MM), Rice University (DMA) Favorite hymn: “I Need Thee Every Hour” Languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French Interview produced by Kathryn Peterson.

As the Global Acquisitions Curator for Art for the Church History Museum, Laura Allred Hurtado has a unique understanding of how art impacts our worship. She also understands how vital it is to increase the representation and breadth of women in our artwork, and she has made some revolutionary strides in rectifying this dearth that impact our most mainstream practices. You currently work as the Global Acquisitions Curator for Art for the Church History Museum. How did you get involved in the arts, and what led you to where you are today? I grew up in Los Angeles, which is a city packed full of museums and culture. When I was younger, we spent summer afternoons going on “adventure days.” My mom would take a van load of grubby pig-tailed children (hers and many spares), out of the suburbs and into the city to visit art museums, often landing at the Los Angeles County Art Museum, a huge complex of several buildings packed full of a large and diverse collection. My mom is an artist and had art books throughout the house and was very fond of Mary Cassatt of whom she replicated in her own work. Both my parents are passionate people who are interested in other cultures. They traveled a lot and lived aboard. I was born in Bogotá, Colombia. So I think a passion for art and ideas comes from both of them. My senior year, I saw a William S. Burroughs exhibition at LA Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). At the time, I was obsessed with beat poets, so Burroughs was someone I was familiar with and whose practice seemed more accessible (at least in terms of timeline) than French Impressionism. One piece, in particular, stood out. It was an installation of a plywood board shot many times over until the center was missing. It was, under any other circumstance, a discarded piece of trash, something to be found at a shooting range. But, within the context of the museum, it was suspended with care from the ceiling and stood about four feet in front of the wall and hung at body height. It was perplexing, complicated, and tremendously smart. Burroughs, as you may know, (accidentally) shot and killed his wife while playing William Tell and the piece had the memory of her body and the shadow of that violent act implicit in it. And there was something significant about standing there, as a witness to a crime scene, looking at the shards of wood fibers, splitters, fragments, explosions, that was really transformative for me. Laura Allred Hurtato I went to BYU and graduated with a degree in Art History and Curatorial Studies and graduated in 2001. I married my sophomore year and by May of 2002, my son was born. I was 22 at the time. Your first child is like a hurricane. It totally changes your identity and at times, it just felt overwhelming to me. I acclimated, got my bearing, dove in deep and four years later, I had Stella. I found staying home very rewarding, but I also became restless. I found it hard for me to measure personal success when I stayed home. It was amazing to watch my children grow and accomplish so many things. But I felt like I was floundering personally. I went back to school to get my master’s degree at the University of Utah in Art History and Visual Studies when Stella was 2. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship and the funding included a stipend that was enough to cover child care. After graduate school, I worked as an adjunct instructor at the University, then worked at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art as Curator of Education. I started working for the Church History Museum in January 2013. When our daughter Ruby was born in 2014, I kept working full time. What was your focus in graduate school? I focused on contemporary art with an emphasis on works that grappled with themes of feminism, gender, and identity construction. I wrote about an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum called Global Feminisms, curated by Maura Riley that, with startling noteworthiness, included several works on motherhood. I contrasted those images with 1970s visual representations of motherhood, specifically Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, which is the central piece for which the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn was built to hold. I was interested in how these images differed and how they evolved. A lot of my research ended up being about how contemporary feminist practices that engaged with parenthood, as subject manner, explored the experience in significant ways. Often, the works, in the exhibition, were about reclaiming the space of motherhood, putting a stake in the ground, challenging Madonna type idealism that shrouds and haunts all representations of motherhood and then interrogating it, recoding it, in philosophical, and at times, political ways. What role do you think art plays within Mormon culture and how have you tried to enhance that role? There is a very limited list of canonical Mormon art that you see on the walls of almost every meetinghouse. Distributed through the Gospel Art kit, it’s limited and largely illustrative. Our chapels, with some noteworthy exceptions, are quite bare. Visually, it’s iconoclastic, striped of “graven images.” So, there is, I believe, a kind of (inherited) anxiety about religious images for Mormons. And in general, it’s difficult, I think, for leaders, to want to include artwork that is multivalent. There is a feeling that the message must be clear. So, Christ, has comes to be known through Del Parsons, via inclusion of his painting Christ in the Red Robe being included in mass printings of the Book of Mormon and hung on the walls in homes and in primary rooms throughout the world. Laura Allred Hurtato Such mass reproduction seems to fix the image of Christ, even on a subconscious level. You bring a certain weight or meaning or burden to images because they serve as conduits to belief. Some of the projects I’ve tried to implement at the Church History Museum challenge that paradigm. Personally, I like images where Christ’s back is turned and you can’t see His face, in part, because it allows such a loaded and iconic figure to be sorted out on a personal level for the viewer. I worked with J. Kirk Richards on a project called “The Christo Series” which is a single work of art that is made up of 150 paintings of various sizes of Christ. In some, Jesus is very abstracted and obscured, but I like this version of Christ because it mirrors the terrestrial fog in which we access Christ here on earth. I’ve tried to challenge that paradigm through my collecting practices as well. Luckily, there is a lot of freedom within the acquisition process at the Church History Museum. I’ve been able to collect a lot of things that have surprised me. I’ve tried to expand the museum’s field of vision largely because the dictum of the church history department is to collect, preserve, and share. If we’re going to collect, preserve, and share the cultural legacy of the LDS people, then we need to think outside of the standard, gospel art kit. LDS artists are doing all kinds of things that explore their faith and the Mormon experience. To give a music analogy: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is appropriate as an LDS cultural signifier but so is Imagine Dragons and so are The Killers. I’m negotiating those artistic boundaries and negotiating ways in which we can be inclusive when thinking about Mormon aesthetic practices. What role does art by and about women play in your collection and exhibition practices? Early in my church employment, I read a short story by Carol Lynn Pearson called “Walking In Pink Moccasins.” Basically, it utilizes a rhetoric that is commonly geared towards women, and gears it towards men in a painfully ironic and satirical way. It made all the more obvious to me the many ways in which we could work to be more inclusive in general as a church, and how much I need to work, on a micro level, to be more conscious in collecting practices and exhibition strategies. So, I’ve made efforts to collect works by women artists in an attempt to make some compensatory changes in the church history collection. There are many great LDS women artists so that’s been easy. Shortly after I started working at the Church History Museum, they opened an exhibition called “100 Years of Scouting.” People have their own personal feelings about the scouting program but in general, the exhibition brought a lot of people in and from a museum exhibition building view, it was a great show. But it felt a bit unfair in terms of budget distribution and it replicated such inequalities that exist on a macro level through church programs. So, when I was asked to create an exhibition, I proposed the show “Practicing Charity: Everyday Women of God.” It isn’t a feminist show but it was an exhibition that highlighted three artists, Lee Bennion, Kathy Peterson and Brian Kershisnik, all of whom have a collective community interest and whose body of work tends to focus on the image of woman. Often times, their figures are depicted doing rather mundane, really banal things, but in the act of having them painted, in the isolation of these acts, the women seem transformed, even honored. For example, Kershisnik’s “Bringing Food” depicts a woman holding a bowl that looks like a sacramental offering. There’s steam is coming up from the bowl, and it’s like a sacred offering. The painting captures this holy gesture—and who knows who she’s bringing food to? She could be putting it on the table for her family; She could be bringing it to a neighbor. I felt like implicit in all three of the artists’ works was the theme of glorifying the everyday and recognizing the banal as worthwhile, meaningful, important, and even sacred. This applies particularly to women’s work in the every day. Laura Allred Hurtato and Her Family What do you think it does for us as women to see images of women in LDS visual culture? “You can’t be what you can’t see.” I think maybe it was Marian Wright Edelman who said this. But I heard it over and over again on Mormon Feminist blogs and in my feminist readings during graduate school. Certainly, there is truth to it. Marginalized populations benefit from being seen. It helps to shape a sense of self, a sense of personhood, a sense of mattering to the world. Women have long been written out of history–it’s certainly not just a Mormon paradigm. I think there’s something really important about finding opportunities to be inclusive and looking for moments, ways and places, where the many achievements and contributions of women can be highlighted. For example, I made a few acquisitions that have started, in part, to reshape some of the visual narratives in the conference center. One is a collection of illustrations of women from the bible by Kathleen Peterson, taken from the book by Mcarthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spaling’ called Girls Who Choose God. The other acquisition is Elspeth Young’s Till We Meet Again, a depiction of Jane Manning James, who was one of the first African American converts to the church and among the first African American to settle in the western frontier of the United States. Additionally, I worked to arrange a loan of the painting She will Find what is Lost, by Brian Kershisnik. I included those two acquisitions and the loan in the conference center after working to include portraits of women auxiliary leaders there as well. Visibility matters. These stories matter. What are some tips for incorporating art into our homes? How can we instill a love of art and visual literacy in our children? Integrating art into our homes can be a challenge. Cost can make original art prohibitive. And yet when really great and meaningful works of art are replicated into a poster, so much of the significance is lost, and they seem to stand as shells or echoes of the original. In our family, we’ve tried to make it a priority to collect very small works that are meaningful to us. Installing the Church History Museum's New Permanent Exhibit In terms of instilling a love of art, we certainly go to museums a lot and because I worked as a museum educator, I ask a lot of questions about what my children see and what interests them in the gallery. We had a wonderful time once at the National Gallery in London with a very well designed children’s guide. My then 10 and 6 year olds spent hours scavenging the museum, finding all of their favorite pieces, and then lying on their tummies and drawing a copy of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. We go to lectures, gallery strolls, and exhibition openings often. We have many friends who are artists. We talk about art and have books around the house. They attend an art focused school. It is clearly a passion for me and my husband. And yet… I’m OK if my kids don’t walk away from our family life together with a love of art. Visual literary—Yes, absolutely; Critical thinking skills—Yes, but a Love, No. It is certainly my love, but more I want them to understand that when you love someone, you support them in their interests. And my children have many interests and passions: cats, football, guitars, music, Instagram, social justice, American Girl Doll, roller skating, stuffed animals, Daniel Tiger. They love those things, so we talk about them and we spend time doing those things as well. We learn from each and from each other’s passions. What role can art play in our spiritual development, if any? How does art inform your spirituality specifically? If I’m feeling very unsentimental, I think of art as mere objects—things of conspicuous consumption. That’s if I’m being super nihilistic and that’s one end of the spectrum. Then, there’s this other end of the spectrum where I see an image, and it is transformative. It feels trite to say that some art speaks to your soul, but that’s kind of what happens. It communicates a truth to you that you already knew on some level or asks you a question that you were ready to be asked and have a conversation about. I think those moments of standing in awe in front of a really engaging work of art are sublime. I think that experience is probably a micro version of how you would feel in the presence of God. Most days, like many people, I’m a bit in between. At A Glance Name: Laura Allred Hurtato Age: 35 Location: Salt Lake City, UT Marital History: Married Children: Samuel, 13; Stella, 9; Ru, 15 months Occupation: Global Acquisitions Art Curator, LDS Church History Museum Schools Attended: Brigham Young University, BA Art History and Curatorial Studies; University of Utah, MA Art History and Visual Culture On the Web: http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/ Interview by Krisanne Hastings Knudsen

Christie Frandsen feasts on the scriptures. And she has taught eleven children and the two hundred missionaries that have gone through her seminary and institute classes to do the same. In this interview, Christie talks about how she studied the scriptures formally and on her own, how she taught others to love them too, and why it is important to her that we not only see the scriptures as a “quote book” but rather understand their whole impact. You have a deep relationship with the scriptures. How did you begin your relationship with the scriptures? What got you going? Well, I grew up on Indian Reservations. Very remote. The whole branch was basically my family. When I was in sixth grade, my mother was an early morning seminary teacher. Even though I was only in sixth grade there were not very many students in the class so she asked me if I wanted to come to seminary. I loved that I had the opportunity for my mother to be my teacher. It was Book of Mormon that first year and I remember on several occasions really being moved by what my mother was teaching me. I don’t know if it would have happened the same way if it hadn’t been my mother. I think because it was my mother I saw her in a new light. Having the Book of Mormon opened up to me by her was a really moving experience. I stuttered very badly when I was young and there was one passage in particular that she was the first to show me in Ether 20:12. “I will make weak things become strong” and people will mock you but “fools mock and they shall morn.” That passage was probably the first verse of scripture that I really felt it was the voice of the Lord speaking directly to me. And that helped me, gave me great hope through many, many years of not being able to communicate very well. So that was my first introduction to the power that scriptures can be in my life. I came to BYU with the plan to major in chemical engineering. I had taken two years of chemistry in high school. I thought, you know, I love chemistry, I’m good at chemistry. So I get to BYU, my first chemistry class and I realize I’m not good at chemistry! I had kind of a rough time, I didn’t have any confidence at all in my academic preparation for BYU. I was very insecure. I got good grades but it was because I worked my head off. I didn’t feel any particular aptitude or direction and I really just floundered. Like, what am I going to major in? Well, I thought, maybe food science? I had a brother-in-law at the time who had said that that was a good field for women. Because you can use that as you raise your family. Thought about that for a little while but that didn’t seem right either. Christie Kay Hansen Frandsen as a Young Mother I came back sophomore year still absolutely clueless as to what I’m going to major in. And that semester I saw a little notice on one of the buildings on BYU campus about a semester abroad to Israel. I don’t even know what caught my eye about this and I especially have no idea why the thought came into my mind that this was something that I could do. And should do. It was absolutely not even in the realm of possibility for my family. It cost a lot of money and it was so exotic. I was just so compelled and just felt a really powerful prompting of the spirit that I needed to do that. I had already missed the first introductory orientation meeting, they were already well into their weekly meetings with the kids that were going to be going. I was a little bit behind the game but I joined in with this and paid for it all myself with all the money I had saved my entire life working at BYU and working summers. And I went. I didn’t know anybody in the group, was extremely shy and backwards socially. But I went on this semester abroad and had a life transforming experience. It was an incredible experience. Lamar Barrett was our director and we had a man named Keith Meservy who was just this intrepid enterprising adventurer. He got us in places, experiencing things that no other semester abroad had ever, ever done. It was truly the experience and the opportunity of a lifetime that I just happened on to. I met good friends and gained a lot of social confidence during that but especially it was like, this, this is what I love. And this is what I was meant to do: study the scriptures. Except for religious education, there wasn’t a major in ancient scriptures because it wouldn’t lead you to any profession. BYU didn’t encourage people to major in things that wouldn’t be able to support them later on. So there wasn’t a major but they had something called university studies back then. If you could make your case— you went to a committee and you presented your own plan, you could come up with your own major. So I presented my case and they accepted it so I designed my own major. University Studies, Ancient Scriptures. And I basically took classes from all the professors that I loved, that I wanted to learn from. It was just fantastic. This was the beginning of my junior year. I had taken several classes from BYU’s top New Testament Scholar at the time. I think he is still teaching there. I hesitate in using his name. Anyway, I was trying to catch up with two years of lost time. So I was taking twenty-one hours, working twenty hours a week at as a student advisor at the college of fine arts, which was a hard job. A responsible job. Then I had met this guy, so I had to decide if there was going to be a possibility of dating. If there was going to be a relationship, then I needed to clear my calendar a little bit so I decided I would drop this class that I was taking from this professor. I went in to talk to him about everything and I was fully expecting him to say, “Of course, oh my goodness, what in the world were you thinking? Hand me that drop card and I’ll sign it right now,” but he didn’t. He just looked at me and he said, “I want you to think really carefully about this decision.” He said, “We need women in this field and you could contribute something. And I’m not going to sign your drop card. Because you need to think about if you just want to get married, or if you want to really do something with this wonderful gift that you have been given.” He said, “I want you to think about it and if you still decide you want to drop this class, then I will drop this class no questions asked. That would be fine.” The Frandsen Family I was just absolutely shocked at his response and really taken aback. I really did some soul searching that night but thankfully, the Lord knowing me, I had just had some very clear inspiration that, Russ, my husband, was the guy I was going to marry. And it was one of the clearest answers that I had ever received to prayer. And so I knew that I really did need to drop this class, so I did. I did not, I’m embarrassed to say, have the courage to go back to him. I went to the department secretary and said, “He said that it was ok if you just would sign this.” So I never saw him again but all of my children (I have eleven kids, nine living) but the last two ended up taking classes from him. And I made sure they went into him and told him that they were my children so he would know that I had done something truly important with my life. I produced these kids. I left BYU after just three years. My husband was going to Duke Law School and so we searched and found out they had a really good divinity school there. They had all the classes, you know, Greek and Hebrew and all the biblical study classes that I wanted to take. So I took classes at Duke Divinity School. I had overloaded on hours so I had plenty of hours. I didn’t really go very far in that major. I kind of feel like a little bit of a fraud, when people say, “Oh, you studied ancient scriptures.” I barely started studying Hebrew and Greek, it’s not fair at all to say that I am skilled in these academic tools. But I was the first LDS student they ever had at Duke Divinity School, which was a pretty great experience. One of the classes that I took was taught by a Jewish man and it was Jewish response to Christianity. He would, on occasion, want to quote a passage from the New Testament and after the first day of class it was very clear that I knew the New Testament better than anyone else in the class. It was kind of funny because we have more scriptures to learn than anybody else but because of seminary and because of some great New Testament professors at the Y, I really did know the New Testament better. So anytime he needed a passage from the New Testament he would ask me. It was fun. So I majored in Ancient Scriptures. And then we moved out to California. And my first church callings were Primary, you know because I had all these little children and then I got involved in Young Women. Just the typical female experience in the church. Really wonderful, but nobody really knew I had any kind of great interest or aptitude for scriptures… Until we were having a Relief Society mid-week activity and one of the women in the ward was the mother of my best friend that I met on that semester abroad many, many years before. She knew that I had been to Israel and she knew I had this background in ancient scriptures. So she asked me to teach this class. And that really was the beginning of anybody, even me, knowing that teaching the scriptures was what I was kind of meant to do. And it came from being an active member, accepting church callings— what we all do. So I taught this class and it became extremely popular and we had to move out of her living room into my living room. Then into the Relief Society room at the church and then in the chapel at the church. There are women that come from Glendora Tuesday mornings to come to this class that I teach. And it is not because I am funny or witty, you know. It’s because I love the scriptures and it is my gift to open up the scriptures and make the scriptures be alive. I do know that. I am very aware of that. Christie Kay Hansen Frandsen and Her Mother Because of that class I was asked to become the first female Gospel Doctrine teacher in this ward. You know, they had never ever had a women before! There were some patriarchal men who were a little concerned about that, even skeptical. But it was a good experience and then they asked me to be the seminary teacher and I’ve been teaching early morning seminary for sixteen years. And I have been teaching this Relief Society class for nineteen years. Then I found out that they needed volunteer Institute teachers. These institute directors couldn’t offer me a full time position because I still had children at home, but I talked to the institute director at Glendale and they invited me to teach there. And then the institute director at USC invited me to teach there. And then at Occidental College. It really just kind of spread. I would be asked to do firesides or speak at women’s conferences. So how do you actually study the scriptures yourself? Most of what I know about the scriptures really came after I started teaching. My professors at BYU ignited the love and the passion and maybe gave me a little bit of insight on how to study the scriptures. So many people ask me how do I do it, how do I learn so much and it was basically just from teaching. It has been such a tremendous blessing. It was something that I could do very easily while I was raising my children. And I think it blessed their lives, in fact I know it did. They love the scriptures and it is because I love the scriptures and I would share things with them. They would see me studying and I know that was a really great example, especially to my daughters. It is kind of a Mary story. To sit at the feet of Christ, to read the scriptures, to teach the scriptures with authority. My daughters have something to offer and men will be receptive to that. Let’s talk more about teaching your children. You have eleven children, but when your children were young and you were in the thick of it, how did you manage? Well, yeah, it is hard. It is really, really hard. The system that we found worked the best was dinnertime when they were eating. I would read the scriptures to them. There were some disadvantages to this, such as they didn’t take turns reading. But actually in the end I think it was a good thing. They heard King James language read with meaning and with understanding. They all love the King James Bible and they could all read very well and they could always from the very beginning read the scriptures really well, really fluently with understanding. I think part of that came because we weren’t passing the book around as we probably would have done. Would you read a couple verses, pause and ask questions and then continue? Yup! Absolutely! And we were fairly consistent. We were not one hundred percenters by any means. And then when we had little kids and big kids and that’s hard because the big kids were gone for activities and we would not be able to eat together but that was still something we tried to do. My husband was never really home for that so these kids have the idea that the women, that the mothers are in charge of scripture learning. And that probably would have been the case even if my husband had been home because of my personality and his, I would have probably just been in charge of it anyway. We had a couple of summers when we had older kids and I felt like I really wanted them to get more than what we were able to do with all the little kids at the dinner table. So I started something that we called the Summer School of the Prophets. And we did that for a couple summers. I tend to think about that as kind of a failure because I didn’t continue with it but my kids remember it as being something very important in their lives. And what exactly was it? We would meet with just the big kids. One summer we read and studied the Pearl of Great Price. They would have read a little portion and I would have a little assignment for them and we kind of made it a little bit formal. We had notebooks, you know. And really got into this text. It was a good thing. It ended up really, really wonderful. When we vacationed we loved to go camping. That’s what we do because we couldn’t afford to go to Hawaii or those things. So one summer, we took the kids on church history tours. One time to the Nauvoo/Missouri thing and one time to Palmyra/Kirkland. So they had real immersion in church history as well. We tried to do that because my husband just loves church history. They are really smart kids, which I love. One of my daughters is an early morning seminary teacher now, and all of them have been just great, wonderful teachers in the church and teachers of their children. All of my grandchildren know the scriptures really well and love them. Tell me about teaching seminary. I have been teaching seminary for sixteen years and last summer I thought, “I am going to count out how many missionaries I have sent out from my seminary class.” I have sent out over two hundred missionaries. So I got this big map and I put a little pin in where all of them have served and that was pretty cool thing to see. That is amazing! You know, my influence has gone all over the world. I teach the juniors and seniors so I teach the ones that are about to go out. I help them really, really treasure the scriptures and the word of God. What are your thoughts about the women of the church and their relationships with the scriptures? I think lowering the age for sister missionaries was huge. Gigantically huge. So many more girls are going to go on missions because at age nineteen they can plan it into their life. At age twenty one, they couldn’t make plans. I’ve seen a real change in the girls in my seminary classes. They are really serious about studying the scriptures and serious about seminary. And then as these girls come back, they are going to be Gospel Doctrine teachers in their student wards, in their young adult wards. They are going to be Relief Society teachers and they are going to be using the scriptures. They are going to be scripture scholars because they have studied them. And that’s going to be wonderful for the women who don’t go on missions. They are going to see their sisters in front of them teaching with great power and authority and knowing and loving those scriptures. That is going to have an impact too. So I think that was maybe the most single most important thing to ever happen to really helping women understand and be serious about studying the scriptures. There are few women out in the institutes but they are still very few. I know that by teaching at USC I have been able to have an impact on the women students there, helping them to see that these scriptures are for them. I have always had high expectations that all the girls in my seminary class are going to serve missions and that all my Institute students are someday going to teach Gospel Doctrine and Seminary and even Institute! I express that with great confidence, saying things like, “When you teach, this is going to be what you experience,” and “When you are out on your missions….” I think every women who is invited to speak in Sacrament meeting should take that as a challenge to really study the scriptures. Not just find nice little quotes from General Authorities. I really wish every woman would see herself as a model for her daughters. She should show everybody there just what women can do with the scriptures. There is a great talk by Spencer W. Kimball, he gave it at a women’s broadcast many years ago. He challenged the sisters to become sister scriptorians. He kind of coined that phrase. That all over the world, all over the church there would be sister scriptorians who would be able teach the doctrines of Christ from the scriptures. That was a real eye opener for me. One thing that has really distinguished our church and kept us on track is that we know the scriptures. We treasure the scriptures. We do not just teach the philosophies of men, we teach the word of God and we go right back to the direct source of the word of God. And I am a little bit worried about that now. BYU is changing their curriculum. Required classes are not scripture based classes anymore, they are thematically based classes. One of them is the Book of Mormon but it is not the Book of Mormon, it is like the doctrine of Christ in the Book of Mormon. One of them is the doctrine of the family, one of them is the restoration of the Gospel so that is going to include some Doctrine and Covenants but it is not like studying the Doctrine and Covenants as scriptures. And Old Testament is no longer required. And in Sunday school for our youth now, they are just learning doctrines. We are just getting way too much about learning doctrines but divorced from the scriptures. Christie Kay Hansen Frandsen So the scriptures become like a quote book, a nice little quote book. The only place in the church where children are still learning a volume of scripture as a volume of scripture is seminary. I just am very worried about that. That has been our iron rod, the scriptures, and the word of God. Those scriptures have been miraculously preserved for us and I just worry that we are not just like slipping away, we are running away from that being the foundation of our teaching in the church. But this is the Lord’s church and I’m sure he is going to keep it in mind. So I don’t think I need to worry too much. But you do need to worry because that is what keeps you diligent. And that keeps you doing what you need to do.I think so. And I think that just raising that voice of concern is a reminder. Yeah, ideally kids should be taught the scriptures in their home. I think lots of families are really good about reading the Book of Mormon in their home cover to cover on a regular basis with their children, which is wonderful. But we have three other volumes of scriptures too. That is really important. At A Glance Name: Christie Kay Hansen Frandsen Location: La Canada, California Age: 62 Marital Status: Married Children: 11, 2 deceased Occupation: Homemaker and volunteer Seminary and Institute teacher Schools Attended: BYU and Duke Divinity School Favorite Hymn: It's hard to choose just one! How about "Children of our Heavenly Father" Interview produced by Miriam Hermansen

At age 16, Rosie Card seemed to be living the dream: she was a runway model traveling the world. The experience has given her unique perspective into how women view their bodies and how Satan uses our bodies to distract us from our abilities to gain skills and be creators. Now, Rosie is focusing her efforts on a new line of temple dresses that she hopes will allow women to focus on what’s most important in the temple. You started working as a runway model when you were 16. You were traveling the world, living a pretty different lifestyle from the typical teenage girl. How did those experiences affect you at the time? It made me grow up really fast. You are a kid, but you’re working in an adult industry, and you’re working predominantly with all adults. All of the models are kids, but your agent, your client, the photographer, everyone’s an adult, so you have to grow up and to figure out how to live that kind of adult life kind of quickly. How did you live with the often conflicting messages of womanhood, sexuality, and beauty within the church and then on the runway? Was it hard to navigate both worlds at the same time? I feel like I was your pretty standard insecure 16-year-old. Then I started modeling, and my body went from being the most embarrassing thing about me, because I was taller than everyone in high school, to this incredible thing. People were saying, “You won the genetic lottery,” and I didn’t feel like I won the genetic lottery. Suddenly, I had what the world says should make you happy. It’s one thing to be prom queen at your high school and everyone thinks you’re cool, but then to suddenly be on covers of magazines… It should be the ultimate thing, you should be extremely happy. I had that, and for a while I was thinking, “I should be happy, why am I not happy?” It really started my life mission in learning what makes people, women especially, happy. Because I had what the world and what Satan tell the majority of women should makes them happy, and it didn’t change much for me. Rosie Card When I was a freshman in high school I had braces, and I thought, “All of the boys will like me and I will have friends as soon as I get my braces off.” And I got them off and nothing happened. No one noticed, and it was disappointing. When I started modeling I thought, “All of the boys are going to like me and I’m going to have so many friends because I’m a model,” and nothing changed. And I thought, “What do you want from me, world?” For a long time it left a big question mark in my life, and I thought it was really weird that it didn’t click. I think it took going to college and focusing on school, and then going on a mission and focusing on teaching and learning how to help people, and then I started to feel this happiness and I think it’s really because for the first time in my adult life, my mind wasn’t focused on how I looked. In high school, my whole world was whether people thought I was cool or the boys thought I was cute. In modeling, my whole world was how I looked: whether I could pay my rent was determined on how I looked, how I could feed myself was determined on how I looked. Finally, once I went to college and went on a mission, I could focus on other things since there were bigger issues at hand. Of course I still was concerned about whether I would go on dates, and I wanted to present myself well, but it just wasn’t my number one focus. I started to be happy. I’m just a really big believer – and I will preach to the end of this world – that Satan’s number one way to get at women and to immobilize them is distracting them with physical appearance. I think the number one way to fight that, kind of like fighting fire with fire, is just distracting young girls away from their appearance: help them learn skills and give them hobbies and give them things to work on, because you’re never going to feel satisfied by how many likes you get on a selfie. But when you accomplish something, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh I made that,” like if you made something that didn’t exist before, whether it’s a video or a piece of art or if you solved a really hard math equation or you coded or created a website. Whatever it is, I think creating is the greatest distraction and that’s where our self worth comes from. It obviously goes back to who we are as daughters of the Creator. Creating is what we are meant to do. You’re talking about how being taller than everybody, or being tall and thin, was what made you feel awkward early on, and you see so many people who dream of that. No matter what you get, somebody else wants it. Exactly. My point is we sometimes think Satan lets certain people off the hook. He doesn’t. He’s jealous of all us because we have bodies, and we are his greatest enemies since we give new spirits these bodies, something that he can never have. Christ died for our bodies, they are the ultimate gift, and what a sick trick, if he can make us hate the very thing that Christ died for us to have. Our bodies are the tools that enable the plan of salvation to actually happen. He attacks women by making them hate their bodies, but he doesn’t let the girls that are tall and skinny slide under the radar, telling them, “You can like your bodies.” All the girls I was modeling with for magazines and had the “ideal”, had just as many body issues, if not more, as the girls that were struggling with weight at East High School in Salt Lake – everyone was the same. All this stuff about “Show us ‘real women’, or ‘real beauty’”, bugs me because we’re all women. Let’s not try to pit one another against each other. I know you’ve said the sexualization of women’s and girls’ bodies was one of the reasons you left the business. That was when you were 18? Yes, I left the industry right after my last trip was to Tokyo, right after I turned 18. When I was a kid and they asked me to do something like take my clothes off or do lingerie, I could say, “Dude I’m 16, you creep,” but once I turned 18 I was a legal adult on contract. Honestly, I tell people that I was an awful model: I don’t have the heart for it, I don’t even really like having my picture taken, so it didn’t really make sense. So after my Tokyo trip which was really extreme because that was the first time that I was an adult, I just said, “I’m going to take a break and go to college.” My agency said that it wasn’t working, you’re not willing to do what we need, and we’re not giving you what you need to be happy, it just isn’t working. We just kind of called it quits and moved on. Were the issues surrounding the sexualization of women’s and girls’ bodies clear to you at the time, or was it only in hindsight that you began to see those messages? Totally in hindsight. There were things that I thought, “Something about this doesn’t seem right.” I didn’t really get it, nor did I think that I really could question it because everyone else was going along with it. I’d think, “This seems weird that I’m in like a fancy corset and they’re asking me to sit with my legs spread apart.” I honestly didn’t get all of the sexual connotations of it, but it felt kind of sexy and I was 16 and a MiaMaid and I didn’t think I was supposed to feel sexy! Things changed when my mom and I were talking one day and she referenced “that prostitute shoot that you did…” and I was like “What? When did I do a prostitute shoot? What are you talking about?” And she started talking about a specific shoot that I could remember, and she said, “You were a prostitute in that, that scenario was prostitution, that’s why you were laying on a bed like that, that’s why you’re wearing a corset, that’s why you were in a motel that you rent by a half an hour, it’s prostitution.” It didn’t occur to me as a 16 year old, I didn’t get it. When I remembered that shoot, it really bothered me, I felt that I had been taken advantage of and I felt a lot of anger towards all of the adults that had been in the room. They knew what was happening, and they knew what they were representing and no one paused for a second to say, “Wait a minute, are we really glamorizing child prostitution? That’s what we’re trying to say is beautiful? Let’s think about that.” So that really bugged me and that’s where I really started to think about the industry and the situations that girls are put in. I put a lot of thought into experiences that I had, realizing, “Whoa, that was a really risky situation that I was exposed to,” with no second thought by my agent, and I loved my agents, but they’re not my parents and it’s not their responsibility to parent me. Rosie Card Your capstone project in college was a documentary on the fashion world. What is wrong with how the world, the media (although we usually unfairly blame just the media), how we portray women’s bodies today, and what needs to change? I think the ultimate problem or one of the many problems is simply the idea that the greatest thing a woman can achieve is beauty. A lot of people say, “Why did you leave modeling?” And I’ll answer kind of tongue in cheek, “Because I realized I was capable of more than looking beautiful and walking in a straight line in stilettos, there is more that I can contribute to this world.” Honestly, it’s bewildering to a lot of people, like “You left modeling?!” as if I walked away from the ultimate achievement for a woman. I do think it’s the media but I also see, now that I’m a photographer, the women that will bash the media for giving us this hyper sexualized, idealized beauty image, are the same women that are requesting their family photographers to take 15 pounds off them and to remove the bags under their eyes and perfect them. Wait a minute! I think one of the greatest things would be if female photographers and family photographers started being gate keepers and saying, “No, I’m not going to do that, you’re beautiful the way you are.” In all my contracts, it says that I won’t liquefy your body and I won’t remove pounds because I think you’re awesome the way you are and I don’t want to contribute to any of that in this world. I think you can never achieve ultimate perfection and beauty, because there’s no such thing. If the world or Satan can get women to just focus on that ever-elusive goal, there are so many things they won’t do. If I spent the time that I used trying to figure out make up in high school or how to wave my hair with a three barrel curling iron, if I instead was learning how to code with all of that time, nothing could stop me, I would have this massive career at my fingertips, but instead I can curl my hair. Rosie Card And there’s nothing wrong with enjoying taking care of oneself either. No, for sure! I’m definitely one to believe that you should dress well, do your hair, makeup, all of those things. But I do feel that it comes at a cost. Those things take time and we have a limited amount of time. If you add that to social media and magazines, we just spend a lot of time focused on those things, and we can’t spend that time elsewhere. Flash forward to today; you are launching a new line of temple dresses, which I think are absolutely beautiful by the way. From the catwalk to the celestial room, seems like an unlikely leap. Is there any specific doctrine regarding womanhood or our bodies that particularly motivated you or inspired you in this? I’ve been working on Q.NOOR for a year, and it was initially an idea that I got while I was at the temple, because I was observing women’s dresses. As I kept working on it, it’s something that has gained more meaning and I’ve gained new insights to why it’s so meaningful to me. It goes back to that idea of distraction. I think if a young girl is nervous about how she looks in the temple because she’s wearing a temple dress that looks like a pioneer costume, if she’s a typical teenager and is concerned about how she looks, that can be distracting. We all know that the temple is not a runway, it’s not about looking like a babe. But I do think it’s important for people to be comfortable, so my goal is to help these young girls feel beautiful and feel comfortable so that they can forget about what they’re wearing and focus on the temple. I also feel like temple work is part of the most important work that we can partake of in this earth. I always felt a little weird going to the temple in my temple dress because it was not as nice as anything that I would wear to church. It was this weird skirt and this poor quality lace that would ball up and cling to itself, and I thought it was so weird that I dress up more for a party essentially than I do to go to the house of the Lord. I wanted something where I felt like my ultimate best. I wanted something that said, “Here I am, doing the most important thing, and I’m dressing accordingly.” I couldn’t find anything that felt that way, and that was also comfortable and me, and I think it’s important for us to maintain who we are in our personal styles – kind of like when sister missionaries go on missions and they kind of turn into robots, “the perfect Mormon woman missionary.” I want to push against that, because Heavenly Father called you, and your style and your quirks and your personality, and we should maintain that. I felt like I was putting on the temple costume that everyone wore and I didn’t like it at all and it didn’t feel comfortable and didn’t feel right, and I felt that someone needed to offer something that’s more me and girls like me, so that we can feel comfortable and we can feel like we’re wearing what we would want to in order to go and do the most important thing. I think about what Esther went through… I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it was a long period of purification, and beautifying, essentially, before she approached her husband about protecting her people. I’m sure that there was more to it than a pageant – I don’t think Esther is Esther because she was the ultimate babe out of all of the other girls, and maybe that’s why the king picked her because she was the babe – but we know because she saved all of the Jews that there was more to her than that. She had substance to her, she was kind of brave! I think that Esther dressed the best she could for that event because it was a big event, and it took time. I don’t think there’s any problem with us wanting to do the same, wanting to represent ourselves as well as possible. Is there anything else you’d like to add? My ultimate goal with Q Noor sis that it be successful enough that I am able to hire young girls. I think one of the greatest blessings in my life was a woman named Alison Dayton, a young mom, who owned a jewelry company who hired me to work for her as a 12-year-old, and that gave me an opportunity to learn a skill. I learned about business and I had a job. A lot of self worth came from it. So I really look forward to the day that I can do that for another girl. I can’t wait to pass on that favor and offer a job and skills and training opportunities. At A Glance Name: Rosie Card Age: 26 Location: Salt Lake City Marital Status: Single Occupation: Photographer/Small Business Owner Schools Attended: Dixie State and BYU On the Web: http://www.qnoor.com/ Interview produced by Lydia DeFranchi

Leslie Huber’s passion for genealogy started with a simple story about roller skates, and after exploration of the career path, she decided to make family history her life mission. Leslie discusses how she got her professional start and how her faith in the eternal significance of family history work intersects with her professional industry. Would you start by describing how you originally became interested in genealogy? My first experience with family history was when I was about 16 years old. I grew up in Texas but all of my extended family is in Utah. One year we went to my mom’s parents in Torrey, Utah, which is in Wayne County in central Utah. It was a very small community. My grandfather’s mother lived down the street from them and my mom had this idea that I should go and interview my great-grandmother just to get her stories down on paper. I also think she hoped I would connect with her. I thought that was the worst idea I had ever heard. It seemed very intimidating and awkward to me. Growing up in Texas, I didn’t really know my relatives well and the main thing I knew about my great-grandmother was that she was very old, she liked to quilt, and she read Readers Digest in the large print. But nonetheless my mom made this list of questions, got me in the car and drove me down and kind of kicked me out there. So I started asking the questions and within that hour or so I was there, something within me really changed that shaped the way I saw family history from then on. I remember asking her, “What did you like to do when you were young?” and she said, “I loved to dance. I would rather dance than eat.” And she used to go roller skating and she loved to dance when she would roller skate. I asked her about meeting my great-grandfather who had passed away when my mother was 8 so none of us had known him. And she told me, “Well, we got married when I was too young to mention.” Of course, later I looked it up and I found that she had eloped when she was 15 and he was 24. They didn’t know each other very well and her dad had chased them down to stop it, but it was too late and they had gotten married. So then I realized my great-grandmother had a very different life and she wasn’t always this old person. She was a person with this life story that was very interesting. Leslie Huber and Her Family I went to BYU for college and as a freshman I took an Introduction to Family History class really just to fill a religion credit. I found that I was fascinated by the class and I was sitting on the edge of my seat absorbing everything that the professor said. I would look around thinking everyone else must think this is so great too, but the person next to me would be asleep on their desk and I realized that family history really spoke to me in a unique way. At BYU I majored in History. I did not major in Family History specifically because I always knew I wanted to go to graduate school and my professors talked me out of Family History thinking that it would be easier to get into graduate school with a straight History degree. I did do a family history certification there and I studied with some of the world experts there at BYU and at the BYU family history library and the Salt Lake Family History Library. I graduated and I got married the next day. We were living in Provo and I took a job for a genealogy research company based in Salt Lake City. I was doing research projects for clients. My specialty was German Family History and I had absolutely loved everything about family history as a college student, but I found that I did not actually love being a professional genealogist, sitting in the library reading microfilms. This was 1998 and you actually were spinning microfilms and I didn’t love it. I would spend hours and hours and hours looking for a name on a passenger list. I was kind of banging my head on the wall. I switched jobs to working at the United Way and then I went back to graduate school. Let me ask you about that for a minute because I think lots of people enjoy learning about their great-grandmothers and their family members, but it seems you didn’t enjoy learning about other people and their family members, is that accurate? Or did you find that same passion and interest in learning about other people’s family members? I found later that I enjoyed helping other people find information on their families as opposed to doing the research myself for clients. I think part of it was simply it doesn’t fit with my personality super well to be in a library with a cubicle for 40 hours a week and so it was the amount of time spent doing that that frustrated me. I think that with family history, but also with so many other different careers, you have to play around and find a way that it works for you and for who you are. It wasn’t that I didn’t like family history, I actually still loved it. It was just that setting of being by myself in the library all the time. You’re distinguishing between being hired to find family history records and actually sitting down with the client and helping them find their family members on their own. Is that the distinction you’re making? Well, yes there is that distinction, but what I ended up doing is writing for family history magazines and speaking at conferences about family history. I enjoyed much more the education aspect and the writing aspect. I think for me it was important to achieve a balance: I could do client work part of the time and writing part of the time and also go out in the community and speak with people and help them make connections and see that excitement when they do. For me I needed that! I needed those different pieces and so I had to create a different path that was outside of the box of what I first thought it would look like. Take us back to the United Way then and tell us how you figured those things out for yourself. So I went to graduate school in Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin School of Public Affairs and I got my master’s in public affairs focusing on social welfare policy. It seemed like a big departure but my minor was in Sociology and I grew up in a home where both my parents are professors in Sociology and so that was always a part of me too. I graduated at 25 and I had this master’s where I could go work in Social Services with non-profits and this Bachelor’s genealogy experience… I also had a deep passion for writing and I had a two-year-old and I was eight months pregnant with my second child, so at that point I was thinking, “Okay, now what?” I think it was one of those moments where you have to look back at what you thought was your life plan and think, “Where do I go from here? And what do I do with these different things? And how is it going to work in my life?” I don’t think there is one answer but that you have to continually reevaluate this. Going to work for non-profit didn’t make sense for me financially because I wouldn’t be able to cover childcare with my salary. So I started to think about writing. It seemed like something that was more flexible. I saw my training in history and genealogy as an entry point because I had this unique skill set that I felt that I could leverage to help me enter that world. I spent some time walking around bookstores reading magazines and getting a sense of what was out there. I decided that writing for magazines about history or family history would be a good fit for me so I began to pitch magazines. So you did a traditional cold call pitching? I did. I got traction in the family history and history arena. I didn’t get it very quickly, but the truth is there aren’t that many people who love to write and have a background in family history and so it wasn’t that hard to break into those types of magazines. In fact, my first article that I published was a back page article about the story that I just told you about my great-grandmother and “Roller Skates” was the name of it. So it was an essay about my entry into family history. What publication was that in? That was in a magazine that doesn’t exist anymore. I think at that time it was the Family History Magazine and later it became Everton’s Genealogical Helper. o I wrote a lot for those trade magazines, ancestry magazines, and I wrote a lot for Family Chronicle. Then for some more straight history, History Channel Magazine, American History Magazine… You had a marketable niche that you were writing in. If you were to give someone advice about magazine writing what are some other secrets of the trade that you would share? Is it important to have patience and build up your network? I actually lecture on breaking into magazine writing and some of the things that I talk about is that people always tell you to shoot for the moon but that’s actually a bad strategy. As a newbie, a big publication is not going to hire you, so you need to build up some “clips” that you can show at each step. You want to start with some sort of publication that is small enough that you don’t have to have previous publications: your local newspaper or a small magazine or whatever, but start to get your name in print. That might mean writing a few for free at the beginning. As you start to look into magazines, it is important that you study their admission guidelines so that you’re pitching things that make sense for their readers. It usually makes sense to start by pitching to one of their specialized departments more than by a feature. They are much more willing to take a risk on a small feature than their cover story. So maybe you write a little half page. The first time I wrote for Family Tree Magazine they had this little place where they highlighted traveling experiences with family history, and I had gone to old world Wisconsin where you can learn about your ancestors and how they lived in the 1800’s. My article was just a paragraph or two, but the editors also need to see that not only can you write but you’re dependable and you can meet deadlines. If they tell you that it needs to be 1,200 words it cannot be 1,250 words. But if they edit your piece, you have to be flexible about that. Leslie Huber and Her Husband There is another part to the writing path: speaking. We lived in Wisconsin, but then we moved to Spain, and writing for magazines was something that’s very flexible so my editors didn’t even know that I moved to Spain except for that I changed where they sent my checks. In 2006 we moved to Massachusetts and by that point I had become aware that there was a genealogy community. Not just these magazines, but societies and conferences which I hadn’t even realized there were before. After we moved to Massachusetts, one of the national conferences was being held in Boston that year and so I decided to go. I had never been to any sort of genealogy event at a local level but I thought, “This looks fun. I think I could do this.” I took copies of their brochures, went home, made up my own brochures based on articles I had written and I sent it out and within a few weeks they had booked me to speak. So the first time I ever went to a local genealogy society, I was their paid speaker. I loved speaking. It was really fun and it got me out talking to people and I enjoyed that and so I spoke locally. I had to broaden myself beyond German heritage because Massachusetts isn’t really a German place so I talked about immigration, writing, telling the stories of your ancestors. My speaking engagements grew to national audiences. I felt like I really got an energy from talking to people and feeling their enthusiasm about something that I was enthusiastic about. And tell me about your book. So how did that come out? My book is called The Journey Makers. I had a desire to use the story of my ancestors to tell the broader story of the European immigration experience. I didn’t want to just write a family history for my family because I feel like there are so many people in this country who are descendants from the 1800s European immigrants and their amazing story is under celebrated. But I used my family’s story to make it less like a documentary and more like a personal journey. I went all the places that they had come from – Germany, Sweden, England – and they had all joined the church and settled in Utah. I wrote about how this immigrant history affects the way I feel about myself, my role as a mother. The book is mostly sold at family history conferences and historical societies and ethnic societies like German and American societies. It’s not really a Mormon story, and so I didn’t target a Mormon audience. Leslie Huber Is there anything in particular related to digital content that you would suggest to someone who takes a lot of photos and leaves them on their phone or their computer? How will that affect family history in the future? Digital devices create kind of the opposite problem than we used to have. You can hardly find any photos particularly of women who were not prominent in the 1800’s whereas now all of us have hundreds of pictures of ourselves and our kids…. Labeling digital photos is equally important, but we can also write our stories in a way that can be digested and preserved, instead of leaving a computer full of emails for someone to sort through. Genealogy is so intertwined with Mormonism, you as a member of the church have a spiritual motivation as well as this personal interest. What have you learned about the importance of family history as a part of the doctrine part of the gospel? For me, family history is something that unites us with many other people. It’s not an LDS church phenomenon. When I would go to these conferences – especially when I lived in Massachusetts – there would be 700 people there and maybe four would be in the church. And these were all people that felt drawn to this work. To me, that is really powerful and something that I think many members of the church don’t see: this work affects so many people who also feel drawn to learn about their family and understand them. I’ve heard non-member genealogists talk about how they have dreams that lead them to particular information or they have promptings to look certain places. One man said, “I don’t chase my ancestors, they chase me.” Those kinds of experiences have always been powerful witnesses to me that this work is very far reaching and has an impact on so many others. In the church, we do have that other step of taking names to the temple and sealing families together which, to me, is something that is very important. But other people still feel that draw of bringing families together, of being able to do for someone what they cannot do for themselves. And to me that is what true service, is whether its genealogy or something you’re doing for someone in your local ward: helping them meet a need that they are unable to meet on their own. That is certainly something that family history does. Would you share your thoughts on how we find and bring family names to the temple? Leslie Huber I have some strong opinions on the way that we approach family history at church. I feel like sometimes within the church we get very focused on finding a name to take to the temple, and while that is important I think that family history is bigger than that. There are lots of ways to be a part of family history. My husband laughs because someone will get up in sacrament meeting and talk about how they were on the computer for 30 minutes and they found 1,000 names and all the muscles in my body get tight and I start to clench my teeth and I’m like “Ahhh!” We also extend these challenges to find names by a specific date and I feel like this is actually very detrimental and damaging. The reason I feel that way is because every day names go through the temple that are wrong, that have already been done, that are so broad that no one can tell who they are… and while it is still a valuable experience for a person to go through the temple individually, of course, I feel like we are not actually doing the work that the temple has been set up to do on the other side. So by all means the person should go to the temple and have that experience for themselves, but to me it’s much more important to do it correctly than to do it quickly. It is so easy to get bogus names or repeat names. I wish we spent more time educating people about family history and how to evaluate records. The church’s Family Search is amazing and people get on and they look at their names and family tree, but that is a drop in the bucket of what is available on Family Search. They also have lectures, classes, research guides, outlines, directories, tons and tons of original records constantly growing. We as members need to put forth time and effort up front instead of promoting the notion that having never looked at your family tree you can get online and in an hour have 1,000 names to take to the temple. I feel like if we believe this is so important than it’s worthy of our best efforts. So I wish that we spent a little more time. I had a professor in college that used to tell us a story: you get a name at the temple and it might say Mary Smith born about 1800 in England. So up in heaven it’s announced, “Great news! Mary Smith was baptized!” and thousands of people come forward. “Oh no no, Mary Smith born in England,” and a few people leave. “… Born around 1800…” Who is that? That’s not a name, that’s a group of people. I wouldn’t want my comments to sound discouraging because I do feel like there is a place in family history work for everybody. There is a place for everyone to contribute no matter where you are in your life. Writing your own life story, writing the story of your parents, labeling your photos, all of this work is also priceless and important and doesn’t require a giant commitment. I feel like it is an amazing and rewarding thing that brings blessings to ancestors but also in your own family. At A Glance Name: Leslie Huber Age: 39 Location: Middleton, WI Children: Four (ages 6, 11, 14, 16) School: Bachelor Degree in History from BYU, Masters of Public Affairs from University of Wisconsin Favorite Hymn: Lead Kindly Light Website: www.understandingyourancestors.com Interview produced by Neylan McBaine

Élodie Picard met and married her husband Paul in France, but his career in the French military and with international peacekeeping organizations took them to the US, Tajikistan and now Austria. She and the children have often been separated from Paul as he has traveled to other countries, where he has sometimes spent months at a time in dangerous conflict areas. Raising three children in several countries and in unique circumstances, Élodie has learned to draw her family close and rely on the Lord in times of separation, isolation, illness, and danger. Lire cette interview en français Your family has lived in very different parts of the world because of your husband’s job. Where do you currently live? We have lived in Vienna, Austria for three years now. Paul has worked for the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) since 2009. Before Austria, we were in Tajikistan for three and a half years. Let’s talk about your years in Tajikistan. How was it to be a member of the Church there? How did you live and teach the gospel in your home? If I understand correctly, Christianity is a minority there. Yes, it’s primarily Muslim, the Church wasn’t recognized nor legal, so we didn’t have the right to proselyte, even among the international community, we weren’t even allowed to give out a Book of Mormon. If people were interested because they saw that we were a little bit different –at each party at the Embassy we didn’t drink, so that quickly brought up questions – if ever there were some who were interested, we had to tell them that once they had returned to their country of origin, they could contact the missionaries. So, for the Church meetings, we would have them at our home in our living room, with windows closed so the prayers and songs wouldn’t be heard. We had been warned by the church lawyers: they didn’t want there to be stories of people who were members who didn’t respect the law when it came time for the possibility of opening the Church in these countries that were still closed. So the law is that you can’t practice another religion, or just that you mustn’t show it? There is a nondenominational Christian church that could meet, but our own church was not recognized, or registered or legal, so legally we weren’t allowed to hold our own meetings. So it was family. And then American students would sometimes come to study Tadjik Farsi (because they couldn’t travel to Iran), and they would come to our home. Officially we would invite them to dinner – so we’d have our meetings and then they would stay to dinner, and voila. Then, during some of our last months there, we had a true miracle. Our children would complain that there were never any other kids, and Eva (the oldest) always prayed for there to be another family of members who would come with kids – there was a very slim chance of this. Then an American family arrived with four kids! So that was enormously joyful, and by the way, that was the first time that we had to buy Sunday shoes because we never wore them! Every other Sunday we would alternate going to their home and then they’d come to ours. Élodie Picard and Her Husband Paul We would just do primary, the hymns –I was primary president and my husband was the music conductor—and then we would have the sacrament and we would do a talk, either Paul or me. Every Sunday. So, when we had a student who would come, we would ask him or her, “Do you want to give a talk?” (laughs) We did that for three and a half years. And when we came back to Europe, our first Sunday was in Vienna with this enormous organ, and when they started to play the organ and all these voices united together, we were moved to tears. We had sung a capella for so long, with three little children’s voices and two adult voices, so it was a moving experience. We had some beautiful experiences. For baptisms it was the same, we had our son who turned eight there, and he had to wait to come back to France to get baptized, because we couldn’t do it there. Did you speak the language at all, or were you with other foreigners? What was life like for you from day-to-day? I made do, to be polite, to make purchases, to do things. Some of my Tajik neighbors spoke English more or less — specifically those in the home where we lived. It was a twin home we shared with our Tajik landlord who lived with his wife and two kids and their families (there, everyone lives under the same roof). So, I didn’t become too close to the international community, simply because of Paul’s job. When there were receptions, etc., I would go. But me, I was a little different from the other women there who generally had careers, who had a cook, a cleaning lady, a full-time nanny, and so I was a little different as a stay-at-home mom. I did home school, my kids didn’t go to international school…so, that made it so there were many things that caused them to look at us a little differently. So in the international community, I really didn’t have a lot of friends. However with the locals, yes. I was outside with the kids, and so were the other women, so the kids played together; they spoke a mix of Tajik and Russian, like the local children there, so I’d say I was closer to the local community than the international; and it was also intentional. I prefer when I am abroad to integrate myself with the local people than to blend in with the foreigners. It was also tricky because their situation was particular; they are a very poor people, and so I had to be close without being too close, seeing as we don’t have endless financial means and that can quickly create conflict. So, we would often help, but in anonymous ways, so that people wouldn’t be constantly in front of our door asking. That was my first mistake in the first house we rented: I helped out some people, and all day long the door rang asking for something to eat, anything. Well, you can give, but you can’t all the time! So, Paul warned me and when we moved: “Never give out anything from home. When you are in the street and people don’t know where you live, you can be generous, but in your home you simply cannot.” I imagine that there were some pretty bizarre exchanges also, some moments of culture shock. I remember one incident in particular with a goat for a festival… Ah yes, the sheep…it was for the birth of our landlord’s grandson. In Tajikistan, it’s the custom when an infant has lived one month, and then when he has lived a year –because there are many deaths in infancy there– you thank God by killing a sheep in the traditional way: you empty its blood completely, then take out its intestines, you suspend the animal by the hooves… there’s a whole process. It was our oldest’s birthday, and our kids really like animals, so they heard the sheep in our yard (because it was a shared yard with the houses that faced ours), the kids were so happy saying, “Oh mommy there’s a sheep! There’s a sheep!” They were overjoyed. And then, I saw the landlord approach us with his son and an enormous knife, and I instantly understood. I said to the kids, “Get away from the window.” “Oh no mommy!” And we started to hear the cries of the struggling animal. They suspended the animal by its back legs and they cut its throat. There was blood everywhere in the yard. They emptied it, prepared the meat, and cooked it, and then they came to share their meal with us. That was a little bit of a strange experience! You know, us, in our culture, we’re used to things being sterilized and from the grocery store: it’s already all cut up. There, they literally saw the sheep ripped open in the courtyard, it had its eyes open and tongue hanging out, and it was unforgettable. But Jerome, our son, it didn’t bother him much. He said, “Ah well, he’s dead.” Lynn, who was little, was very curious, and Eva was very angry, very sad, and she said, “I will never talk to the neighbors again! I will never forgive them!” But when they brought the plate of meat, she was the first to eat it! (laughs) Élodie Picard and Her Family Near a Village in Tadjikistan We had to pay attention to not give too much advice, because they lived not only in a simple manner but also as if from another era. Once there was a lunar eclipse, and they had to chase away demons so that the moon would reappear. And so it was pretty impressive, because when the moon disappeared, all of a sudden we heard everyone bang their pots and pans with big spoons, they yelled and sang while watching the sky; they were always a little full of superstition. Me, I wanted to explain to them that it was going to reappear, they just had to wait a few minutes! But when the moon reappeared everyone said, “Ah, praise be to God.” They started doing all their prayers. So, it was a little like living in another time. Was it difficult staying close to the Lord when you didn’t have a church community, and when you were surrounded by people who didn’t necessarily have the same beliefs…How was that experience? First, that made it possible for me to learn about other faiths, and to see that there were people who lived their faith in a very beautiful and very holy manner, and really I admired it very much. I met some Christians who had left everything to come to that country to bring Christianity and teach of Christ, and they served in a beautiful way. There was one American family, he was an ophthalmologist and could have earned a good living in the United States, but he came there, they really lived in poor conditions, and he taught ophthalmology for free there, and he also took any opportunity to teach about Christ and the Bible. And of course I met Muslims who were very faithful and who lived their religion in a way that actually is very similar to ours. They focused on others, on service, they honored God, and actually we had lots of things in common- which I also appreciate. So, we traded. They would do Ramadan and we would do fast Sunday and then we would talk about it. Paul also practiced Ramadan for a month! So, I mean it when I say that it was really a rich experience. On a family level, it brought us closer than ever. Paul was often gone on missions for the Army before we moved to Tajikistan, which meant it was only our little family unit during all these months in a row, which really bonded us closer, I believe. Plus, the kids were able to grow up listening to their parents share testimonies regularly, at least every week! (laughs) When it comes to faith, what I missed, and what I hadn’t realized before, was the visiting teachers, the home teachers; the fact that sometimes we could chat, count on each other. During the winter Paul would sometimes leave for several weeks way up in the mountains and he couldn’t come home. In these cases we no longer had the Priesthood, so no more Sacrament either. I really felt how much was lacking from Sundays. That’s why Sunday in this church is for taking the sacrament. It’s the most sacred time, the most solemn and the most important part of the Sabbath day. And when I didn’t have the sacrament, after three weeks or a month, it was really hard. I felt in serious need of replenishment. And I had never felt that before not having it. Now you live in Austria and the way of life is obviously very different. What are some of the joys and difficulties of perpetually living abroad? Life in Tajikistan was very simple. There weren’t extracurricular activities everywhere, even the capital is a quiet, small city, and they really live by the rhythm of the seasons. Meaning, in developed countries we forget that it’s winter, fall, spring and summer…there, in fall and winter, there is nothing left in the stores, nothing left in the markets, and when spring arrives and you find all these fruits and vegetables that come out of the earth once again it is truly joyful. Our first winter, I didn’t know that there would be nothing! We survived on potatoes, carrots and onions, which kept well in the cellar for a long time, and which you could still find at the market during the winter, but that’s all. So after three months like that, the joy when we went to the market and saw cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs…the children literally shouted with joy! After that, potatoes, carrots and onions, we didn’t eat them again for six months! (laughs) We’d had it! And then there, when it’s winter, it’s cold. You can’t properly warm up. The electricity goes out constantly so the heating doesn’t work…Really, you are in survival mode. You wait for the first warm days and the first plants to grow. It’s a beautiful experience to have, in the sense that you really live like I think the people of olden times lived, in cycle with nature. And that allows you to appreciate a little better everything that we forget in our culture. After that, what I appreciate here is of course drinkable water from the faucet — that makes life easy! By the way, one of the first things that we did when we got here was take a shower with our mouths open! (laughs) After that, obviously I appreciate that there is the Church. It’s important for us, I appreciate being able to serve in the Church. I missed being able to do that. For the children, I appreciate all that is offered here with the extracurricular activities, museums, the pool, the library, all the things that we didn’t have there. But the children, you know, they say regularly that they would really like to go back to Tajikistan. They really liked it. Every Sunday we would do our Sunday Adventure, so after the meetings, we would take the four wheeler and we would leave. Ten minutes from downtown, you are in the mountains! So we would drive, we would go to the top of the mountains, we would stop and let the kids run. They would run after the wild horses, the wild sheep, the grasshoppers…When it was snowy, they would roll to the bottom. They were in harmony with nature, which was nice. Of course as children, for them, it was paradise. As an adult, there are all the worries of how am I going to feed them, when am I finally going to have electricity to get the machines working again, oh no, I almost don’t have any drinkable water left, I’ve got to find a way to get some…all the little details. How have all these experiences influenced your relationship with Heavenly Father, and also your sense of personal worth? I know that you have had to make sacrifices for your husband’s career that were not always easy, and that there have been challenges when he has been gone. Yes, last year he was in Russia for a year on the border of Ukraine, and on the other side, facing him were the rebels! And then he came back in July, he had been gone 15 months. There, we couldn’t follow him because it was dangerous. But how do I handle all of this? First, I find that it’s very enriching. We have been married 16 years, and we have lived in France for only one of these 16 years. What I appreciate is that I think we have very open minds; after everything that we have come across in cultures and ways of life, ways of raising and educating children as a mother–to see the differences between the Tajiks or the Austrians or the Americans or the French… With time, you realize that we all want the same thing. We want freedom, we want our family to have opportunities and to be in good health, and to be happy. In every culture, no matter the religion or the people, it’s always the same thing. Yet, there are still ways of getting there that are different. In certain cultures, having a good job and a good salary is all that counts because it’s what they think brings happiness and opportunities for their family. In other cultures, money and work aren’t as important, what is important is health, having enough to eat, having a roof over your head. As a daughter of God, it’s really that that I felt. It’s that people aren’t different in God’s eyes. He loves and blesses each one of his peoples. Your relationship with Heavenly Father can be different because you are Muslim or Christian, and there are even people who don’t believe in God, but still I know that He is there and He helps them and He listens to them and He knows what they are going through. It’s beautiful to see, and I think I really learned to accept truth and goodness everywhere, no matter where it comes from. I didn’t have that notion of, “Oh, I am a member of the Church, the true church of Jesus Christ, so I know better or maybe more than others.” Not at all. For me, it’s really the opposite. I learn much from others and their way of doing things. Certainly there are things that I’d look at and say, “That? Never!” (laughs) and then there are other times when I’d say, “Now that’s great!” and I try to add a little of that to my way of living and my children’s also! My kids have a beautiful richness; I see that they have already grown up on three different continents, and they communicate with many different languages. It doesn’t matter what park I take them to, they make friends–whether or not they speak the language, it’s great! And I also know that they are slower to judge. Jerome tells me all the time, “You know mom, we don’t know how they’re educated. We don’t know. We’d better not judge.” He knows that for certain people, that’s normal. On top of that, as a mom, it’s also a little hard because sometimes they do certain things that I know in our French or European culture wouldn’t be acceptable, so I try to raise them the French way, even while not living in France, but it doesn’t always work out perfectly! For example, in Tajikistan, they had learned to spit everywhere, whenever, because there everyone spits and it’s normal–in the street, all the time! And I would tell them, “No, we cannot spit, we’ll go back to Europe and we don’t spit like that!” It was a pain! Well, it’s not things that are essential to their salvation, but… (laughs) That’s what I tell myself. You had difficult pregnancies, sometimes where you couldn’t have Paul by your side, and I remember a while ago you told me that you had found it to be a spiritual experience, that you had to cling more to Heavenly Father. It seems to me that in the end, that applies to many of the experiences that you’ve had with your family. I think that Heavenly Father intervenes in our lives when He must intervene. But certain times, He won’t intervene because there are other solutions. If, for example, medically, I can receive the treatments that I need in the country I’m in, I must go and seek out those treatments. If I was abroad, and I didn’t have access to a specific treatment I needed, what would happen is, it was really faith and the miracle of the Priesthood that saved us—more than one time. And in those moments, I really noticed and felt that the Savior and Heavenly Father, they want to help us. But they also want us to do our part. So, if our part is in another country where it’s possible, it’s up to us to go get a consultation and get the care we need. He is not going to perform a priesthood miracle in that kind of case, where it’s not exactly necessary. Many times, I have no doubt that He was very present, and that He knew that it was Him or it was nothing else. Élodie, Paul and Their Children There were certain people who, when we decided to leave for Tajikistan and take this job, would say to me, “You can’t, you have young children!” I left with a two-month-old baby who was born prematurely, and the other kids were still young. People would say, “How are you going to do it?” and I really left with the assurance that we had prayed, that we had felt that this was what we should do, and I knew that He would help us. And indeed He did, because when we were in Tajikistan, we had come home to France again on vacation and it was during our weeks there that we discovered that I had thyroid cancer. And that happened at the exact moment when it should have. If I had been in Tajikistan, I wouldn’t have been able to figure out what was happening. I would not have been able to understand it, analyze it, do the biopsy and then what followed. Then, when Paul was in Russia last year, it was the same thing: we got down on our knees and felt that we should accept this job, and that it would be good for us, for him, and that he would be blessed and protected. So, we still do that, and I always leave with the feeling of much love, faith, and peace, because even if there is something bad that happens, it’s because it is His will. From the moment that I have this assurance, we do it, and each time it has been like that. He left many times for Afghanistan, he went to Kosovo, and there he was with the crisis in Ukraine, so it was always done with much prayer. And once he left, I didn’t worry. I only worry when he calls and tells me, “You need to worry!” (laughs) That has happened twice, and when it’s like that, I stay on my knees all night, until he calls me back the next day to tell me that all is well. And that is how we overcame all that. So obviously, when a couple is separated, that’s when you discover — you know, in the church we always say that in marriage there is the husband, the wife, and the Lord, the triangle with the Lord at the top, –I believe that when we are separated like that, it’s really at that point that we feel there are really three of us, not just two. And my relationship with Heavenly Father and my Savior is inevitably stronger and more intimate when I am separated from Paul. When Paul is there, I feel that I already have my support, my best friend, the one who understands me…When he’s no longer there and I can’t have him constantly, I turn myself more toward God, my Savior, and my prayers are always richer and more abundant. At A Glance Name: Élodie Picard Age: 35 Location: Vienna, Austria Marital History: Married Occupation: Stay at home mom, homeschooler Education: BA in Psychology from Victor Ségalen Bordeaux Languages spoken at home: French Interview Produced by Lydia Defranchi, Translation provided by Haleigh Heaps Burgon