Vermont family believes in missionary work
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Ask Debra Dunoskovic, and she'll freely tell you how much she loves missionary work.
A convert who joined the Church in Australia as a young single adult, she never forgot how mighty a change the gospel wrought in her life. Sister Dunoskovic and her husband, Robert, strived to instill in their eight children a profound love for missionary work.
"I found the Church through missionaries — that's why I so strongly believe in missionary work," Sister Dunoskovic said. "My husband and I have raised our children that way as well. They've always known that they would go on missions, and they've always looked forward to it (and saved) for it."
Today, as a direct result of those efforts by parents to promulgate enthusiasm for missionary work among their children, the Dunoskovic family of the Montpelier Vermont Stake has four children simultaneously serving full-time missions.
Annie, due to return home next month, is a Spanish-speaking sister in the Washington Kennewick Mission; Stewart, serving in the Nevada Las Vegas Mission, finishes his mission in August; William speaks Cambodian in the California Long Beach Mission and will serve through December 2011; and Andrew, called to the Spain Malaga Mission, entered the MTC earlier this month.
Although it's not unprecedented for a family to have four children serving in the mission field at the same time, the Dunoskovic clan's concurrent missionary service is unique in that all four missionaries submitted their missionary paperwork once they were of age to do so, and none of them stem from adoption or multiple-birth scenarios.
The three Elders were born in a 27-month span. They ended up in the mission field at the same time because the oldest, Stewart, had to wait several months between putting in his missionary papers and entering the MTC while Andrew, the youngest of the trio, experienced a significantly shorter time between submitting paperwork and embarking upon his mission.
