Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

As Yellow mentioned, some countries are covered by a mission with headquarters in another country. Which reminded me of some events from my mission to Italy in the 1960's. At that time Italy had just recently been opened to missionaries. Italy had been a part of the Swiss mission. For a while the Swiss mission covered a large number of other countries where we didn't have missionaries.

Some of those countries became the responsibility of the Italian Mission after it was created in 1966. One of those countries was Ethiopia. This may have been partly because Italy had various interests in Ethiopia. At any rate my mission president used to joke about sending me to Ethiopia. My understanding was that there were no restrictions in doing so. However, there were not enough missionaries to cover even the major cities of Italy, so I believe the mission president thought it was not wise to send some of his missionaries so far away. Having native priesthood leaders in any branches we might have created in Ethiopia could also have been a problem at that time.

I don't know what the situation is today. I know there are now several missions in Italy. Whether or not we have missionaries in Ethiopia I don't know. From the Google map it looks like Ethiopia is now part of the Uganda Kampala Mission. I do think that part of the reason we are not in more countries than we are is that we don't have enough missionaries. In some countries I know we are not permitted to proselyte.

vorpal blade wrote:I do think that part of the reason we are not in more countries than we are is that we don't have enough missionaries.

I've wondered about that myself. 50,000+ missionaries may sound like a lot, but when you compare it to 6 billion people in the world, you really start to realize that they need all the help from the members that they can get.

a number of areas in japan had to be shut down during and after i was there from 2003-2004 because of lack of missionaries. it was sad because the branches themselves had to be shut down since the missionaries were the only active priesthood holders.

I think the main reason we don't have missionaries in all areas is because of the need to have large numbers of active members to run a successful branch. It's just good planning to build up strong centers for the church and spread out from there. This takes time, but results in a much stronger structure than if you were to just send missionaries out all over a region, setting up branches in the homes of each family that converts. Of course, it makes it very difficult for the valiant members who happen to live far away from society, and others who will never hear the gospel in their lifetimes as a result, but it pays off bigger dividends in the end, hopefully blessing their posterity.