If the staff can be convinced that a trip to London or Paris is worthless, then the staff person won't feel quite so bad that he or she doesn't have enough money to go there.

Martindale stated at lunch (at the Summer Advanced Class in 1998) in TWI that he didn't want to hear of Way kids asking their parents for permission to go travel to Europe.

He said that if that trend started, he would start up summer schools again and give Way kids something to do during the summers.

Most Way staff are now left with week long vacation consisting of day trips to the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio and maybe as far as Chicago to visit a museum.

Way staff MUST fill out a vacation request form and submit full details of their vacation plans to their department and cabinet supervisors prior to going on vacations.

These vacation request forms ask information of the staff member such as where the individual will be staying, with whom will they be staying, is the person that they are staying with a disciple or not etc. ( a copy of the vacation form can be viewed in the Adobe PDF section).

Many Way staff who have spent ten and fifteen years and more, working at HQ once had up to three weeks of vacation annually.

However when Martindale got revelation from God to put the Way Corps on full time status for the ministry, Martindale decided to mandate that no-one could have more than one week vacation per year regardless of how many years they had worked for TWI.

Some staff who had served fifteen to twenty years of time with TWI lost their three and four week vacations annually and instead were allocated a one week vacation. The staff also lost the opportunity to decide which week of the year that they would take.

Now, the staff at HQ take either a week in December or a week in June. These weeks happen to be at the height of the travel season. Usually there is no hope of getting travel discounts at these times of the year. That fact is a bitter pill considering that the Way staffers make between $60 and $100 per week.

Way Staff received no compensation for the cut in vacation and in keeping with the manner in which Way trustees normally make decisions, the opinion of the staff was not sought.

Way workers MUST work 6 days per week and usually work between 55 and 70 hours depending on the department in which they work. With only one week off each year, Way workers don't get much time to do anything else in life except to "compete in the spiritual   competition."

Way staff are typically given about $50 per month towards savings. The savings category includes savings for furniture, unexpected expenses, medical expenses, home apppliances such as tv's and vcr's etc or any other personal savings goal that the person might have. Vacations also come under the savings category.

If a Way staffer didn't spend any money from his or her savings category during a given year, he might have as much as $600 for an annual vacation.

This would mean not spending any money on the myriad of things that inevitably come up during the course of a year.

For example, all staff must pay 20% of all their medical expenses. By nature, medical expenses are mostly unexpected and would need to come out of the savings category.

Even if a person could manage to keep all of their annual $600, it's still hardly enough to go away for a week long vacation anywhere considering the starting point is in the middle of rural Ohio and not close to any desirable vacation spot like California or Florida.

Way Trustees however find ways to get more vacations that the one week a year.

As an illustration of this, in 1998 - Donna Martindale and Rosalie Rivenbark took a week long vacation in Florida together.

Donna and Rosalie then had their normal vacations (for which they decided to stay at HQ).

There was also the week long annual trustee meeting in Florida (sometimes it's in the Bahamas), which is billed as a "working vacation", but those on the inside know it to be a rest and play time with relatively short morning meetings held to discuss ministry topics.

Many Way staff rarely get the opportunity to visit "earthly" families because of these time constraints on their vacations.

Way staffers are asking how they can possibly visit their parents on an annual basis (many of whom are now elderly) with their insufficient funds and their insufficient vacation time.

For Way staff, the June vacation "window of opportunity" is now over. All staff will be back at work on 06/14/99.