Crazy-good week....

Mensch-ity Mensch, MENSCH. Another crazy-good week.

Last Monday started out pretty good--if I had the choice, I'd be in Berlin every Pday doing fun stuff and being "tourist-y" but to be fair to Sis. Neukomm, we have a few "lazy" Pdays in between--where we do our errands like groceries, emails, and such, and then go home to lounge around, write letters, nap or whatever. I'm hoping next Monday we can go to Berlin again. It's such a wicked-awesome city. I must say, I OF COURSE remember eating Dunkin' Donuts when we went to Berlin as a family in '04 (it would be totally komisch for me to forget what we ate, right?) but they don't have it by the Brandenburger Tor anymore, something else--but they have one in the Zoologisher Garten Bahnhof, so we've made a trip there after District meeting, haha.

This week has been interesting--we've actually had like the standard snowfall here, some nice good snow, which means it's actually a bit warmer here, zum Glück! We're not in the negatives anymore. We've been doing snow-shoveling service for random people, including non-members related to the wardlings, which has been good for us. Sisters are just so weird, we like doing service! For example, we shoveled snow for the aunt of a member in our ward and before doing so we knocked on her door and asked if we could shovel her snow. She was like, "What? Really? Sure, if you want to!" She said she wanted to invite us over for dinner soon because of it!

I also have a piece of bittersweet news. Actually it's more good than bad. The new convert, Schwester Zimmer finally passed away this week. Sis. Neukomm and I were I think the last ones to visit her besides familiy; we dropped by to say hello, but she looked more like a breathing corpse and the evening following she finally passed away. She was such a stellar example to me, and I miss not being able to visit her like we used to. She would lie in her bed and wonder why she was stuck in bed--she wanted to be able to go to church and serve and teach, and now she can do all of that now, and not have any more pain. She was baptized just a year ago.

Thursday though was pretty fun. We got to meet a new Golden in our district--he looked pretty tired and just out of it from jet-lagged but also having a Stück of Berlin as his Golden City--a lot to take in! But Goldens are always trained by really good missionaries, he just needs to get used to the time difference. Interesting turn of events, Elder JP Turney is in my district now--his mom was my seminary teacher, and his companion is our new district leader, Elder Eggmann from Switzerland. Anyway, after our usual Distrikt meeting-ness, we headed to Eisenhüttenstadt to teach Bianka and her family. Roman, her son was more wanting to have a snow ball fight with us than hear our Thema so we agreed to have a war if he'd sit through it patiently. And JEEZ, we Sisters suited up while all the kids in their staircase gathered outside to play in the snow, and as soon as Sis. Neukomm and I entered the battlefield, we were the most popular targets! We went from black coats to white coats! But it was extremely fun, and we got the kids back pretty well. There's just something about being a missionary that makes every kid in the vacinity want to throw snow at you, meine gute.

After that, Della, a senior in highschool, (daughter of the Branch President) invited us to her talent show at her school to raise money for their Abitur or something, which was, an experience all in itself. For one thing, these kids are pretty talented and entertaining. There was one girl who danced a pretty cool routine to a cool song I like from back home, and then 5 boys "interupted" her and did a sort of "evolution of dance" type routine, but probably the most hilarious rendition that I will ever hope to see in my life. All the songs were popular American songs, and they made fun of the Twist, Thriller, Backstreet Boys, it was just hilarious! All the kids who performed sang in English, something I wasn't expecting, but Della explained that that's what kids listen to and emulate here, I guess. But the dance routine was called "Jungeballet", pretty entertaining.

Let's see--Saturday was absolutely EIN HUNDERT PROCENT VERRÜCKT. Mostly in a good way. It was one of those days where we do our planning but it all went wrong, going all the way to another city to teach Hans, just to get a prompting that we shouldn't teach him that day. It stems from what Präsident told us in our last Zone Conference, that any single investigator of the opposite sex must be taught with a joint teach, in a public place or not at all, and Sis. Neukomm shared with me that there's always a really really bad "vibe" if you will when we go there, so we took the train back home, with our whole morning down the drain. Then later that evening, we walked to our bus stop to go visit Chanrith, who already said we could come but not for very long because he's working on a project. We stopped a man on the way there on the street and ended up talking to him for 45min--pretty good for a street lesson, but he did a lot of talking, too about the problems of Germany and his Meinung about it, and in short, we missed our Straßenbahn. So we called Chanrith, appologized and asked if we could come later, he was fine with it, and so we walked the rest of the way to this stop. ComPLETELY at random, a Wunder in it's purest, raw form, one of our old contacts was there that we've been trying to get a hold of for MONTHS, Gaurov from India. He remembered our lesson about the Plan of Salvation and said that he prayed for a job like we invited him to do and found work, and wanted to hear the rest of the lesson because of it. He said that he works in Berlin and so he's never home EXCEPT for Sundays and he never puts money on his phone, which is why he was so hard to get a hold of, but he invited us to teach him yesterday, which we did. If we were on time for our Straßenbahn, we wouldn't have run into him and had such a stellar lesson yesterday. And our lesson with Chanrith went super well, too! At lunchtime on Saturday I was thinking to myself that it was the worst day ever and I was just so frustrated, and by the time the day was over, I was like, "this is like the best day EVER!" Heavenly Father can still work with verückt schedules.

Sunday was also way rad--Ward Conference and Gemeindeessen! Chanrith and Marcel came with us to church--Marcel is someone we teach that used to be a member, then became Catholic, and now wants to hear the lessons again, but had Angst about coming to church, so it was cool having him there again. There was also some cool people from Berlin to visit for the Ward Conference, the FHV Stake Präsident being a cool lady from Bristol, England who of COURSE had one of the most coolest British accents ever and she served a mission, too so she talked to me about it. We were at Gemeindeessen and she says to me, "Fill up, Sister!" Not like it was that hard! Although some of the talks in church were really...just weird, so for Chanrith, I translated like usual but also taught him more of the 3rd lesson (Das Evangelium Jesu Christi)--because when people say weird things in Church, you definitely start just teaching rather than just translating. ;P

Like I said, really cool lesson with Gaurov. He says he wants to be more religious because he used to drink, smoke and go partying too much and hated his life, but he says that he feels a lot better on the outside and inside by having a more structured life, and now that prayer has helped him, he thinks that church will help him even more. Way cool!

Sis. Neukomm also called a contact that they found before I came, and just wanted to see how she was doing. How bizarre-- because we called Sunday evening and the woman said that she needed comfort because her husband died Saturday evening just out of no where. *insert wide eyes here!* It says in PMG that the Lord is always preparing people who need us, and I've been praying in particular this whole week to find people who are prepared to meet us NOW; "planting seeds" is great, but I really want to teach some people who are READY, NOW.

So yeah, that's my life. Both of you asked me to send stories to share with the ward--are the stories I have now not cool enough? ;P You can send stuff that I have already shared, or if there's a particular story that you want me to explain more in detail or something, let me know. My goal for myself is to have an adventure everyday, and so far so good. Speaking of which, I'm almost done with mission journal #1--I brought a big blue journal that I got for Christmas from Trent & Mandy and I have like 30 more pages left in it--and I'm on page 179! I'm never really up to date, always about 11 days behind, but it's fun--lots to tell! I've been putting lots of pictures in it, too of each of my cities and companions, and wrappers of good Lindt chocolate and my favorite Fruchte Tee and other random-ocities.

So yeah, I think that's about it for the week--this upcoming week is Präsident Interviews! woot woot! It's like Zone Conference, so I'm expecting a day of good fun.

Machts gut! Bis nächtes Mal!

love,
Sis. Whit