Just doesn't like veggies....

Mensch,

Jordo's MTC photo makes him look like such a GREEEEEENIE. :P I wonder if he did that on purpose. And Justin with braces, totally weird! I remember the day I had braces--oh yeah--ONE DAY before Halloween. Boy, was that a treat for everyone else except me, because I could only eat Reeses! Everything else hard or chewy went to the dogs. (i mean the boys! :P) I remember dad shredded up carrots for me and even that took azillion years to eat. Na ja.

But people are always amazed that we are willing to work under very strict rules. For example, Sis. Neukomm's dad was on vacation here and actually met our Branch Präsident in Berlin with a dufflebag SOO FLIPPIN FULL of Swiss cheese, chocolate, Fondu, you name it. It took both of us to carry it! But everyone was shocked that Sis. Neukomm refused to meet with her dad, and that the dad didn't want to meet, either. Total discipline, she didn't even try asking for special permission from Präsident Pimentel, just rock solid.

But something that really everyone should know, member or not, is that it's not just parents sending their kids out on missions. It's young people that CHOOSE to come and serve. You know as well as I do that no one said that I HAD to serve, or that I would be a "bad member" for choosing to stay home, and even though it's a duty of the young men, no one stuffs them in suits, slaps a nametag on them without them first deciding it's THEIR decision. We agree to the terms and rules and stress and opposition and everything else possible, because sometime in our lives we knew it would be worth it and we WANT to work. I'll be first to admit, I definitely didn't expect it to be as stressful and difficult when I began, but my testimony is stronger than that. I know that the Lord guides my every footstep and blesses me even though many times I'm too scared to talk to people or afraid of what they think of me and accepts my work even though a *very special* member lady in our ward thinks we don't give enough of our souls to this tiny branch. The Lord loves his missionaries. The Lord loves his member missionaries. And he shows his love for everyone else in the world by sending missionaries and members to them.

Ahhh, mensch, let's start at the very beginning, "it's a very good place to start" (from the DoReMi song in Sound of Music)

Monday we had Zone Sport in Berlin, and we had some extra time that I could finally get a cool Berlin t shirt! It says Berlin with rainbow letters (surprised much?) all cool and gangster-ish. It's the best Pday shirt ever. Igor, the Neubekehrt played with us and that was pretty fun. He remembered that I came to teach him during Tausch last transfer and asked for my email, which I really couldn't--I gave him my home email and warned him that I won't use it for another year--but he was really excited to see me and I was like, "why do you need my email? I only talked to you for an hour!" But he said that he was impressed with some random thing I said, (I blew his mind I think by introducing him to the Index in the BoM, which in German is both the Bible dictionary and Index together) and called me "one of my Sisters" which I guess is pretty neat. Even having a good influence on people after their baptized is just as important as the time before they're baptized.

Meine gute, Fasching came and went, and nothing cool happened here in FFO! What's the point of having a fun holiday if you don't celebrate it? I think they're still recovering from using all their energy to celebrate Christmas, and need more energy to save up for Easter. I hear that in some bigger cities they have Ostenmarkts like Weihnachtsmarkts so that'll be fun to see.

The weather has been totally unpredictable. It was really wonderfully warm on Monday and it snowed like heck on Tuesday and then on Wednesday the snow melted. What the heck? So I think that means Spring is coming soon.

On Thursday, we spent most of our day helping a family move out of their apartment and clean and stuff, so we got to wear JEANS! They have something like a cherry picker-type thing that they use to move large heavy boxes in apartments. They just send up the platform, load it up from a window and bring it down and put them in the moving truck, rather than going up and down and up and down the stairs... Pretty cool, and saves a lot of time. We then visited Rosel, the beloved "veggie lady" that you guys seem to be such a big fan of, and she made us as usual-- all-vegan food. Not really all that bad, she made something that really just tasted like chicken, but I think it was mostly like celery or something. Maybe I need some of these recipes... but she also made us routabegas, which to me tasted like potatoes. It takes skills to make food like that taste good! I took a picture of the plate, keine Sorge! She's really into being vegitarian and meditation, so she had us meditate after our spiritual thought because she thinks we were really stressed or something. (A considerable warm day and riding bikes made us actually SWEAT that day!) It wasn't too bad, I was apparantly really "relaxed" because I fell asleep! It's better than laughing at the weird intonation of the person talking on the cd she had. "breathe IIIIIINN.....and sloooowly EX-HALLLLLLE..." oh, it was funnier with the German translation that shortly followed.

So we are starting to meet with Alisher, a student here again, after a month of "not being sure if he would be around this week" with school and all. He's really smart and despite all the anti-Mormon stuff there is to read online especially now, he says that he wants to ask us all his questions and has a really strong desire to be baptized. And we have a strong desire to see him make that goal! We haven't set a firm date yet, but hopefully very, very soon.

Also Chanrith is like, our Golden investigator. His project is over in 5 days and then he wants to meet more often to learn all the lessons so he can finally be baptized. We made him a Spiritual Survival booklet to read during the "final countdown" so we can leave him in peace to get everything finished on time to get a good grade and such. But we taught him about fasting, and he's never heard of it before and obviously never tried it before but he said, "if this is what people do to follow Jesus Christ, then I will do it." Woooooah! Can I get an A-MEN? We invited him to fast this upcoming Fast Sunday about a new baptism day, which I not-so-secretly hope is within this transfer, not gonna lie.

Guess what I did this week? I knitted a flippin Swiss flag for my companion. :P

Saturday was a standard, "if anything could go wrong, it will go wrong today" day. It was really cold, rainy, aaaand the day we needed to ride bikes to get around in EHS. Oooooh joy. And not to mention I had the most horrible dooring experience I hope to ever have to endure. I mean, it's one thing having a door slammed in the face, pretty much immune to that now. But we had this lady talk to us and say we were crazy and didn't want to talk about Christ with anyone, and especially not us. Then a neighbor came in the stairway and the lady said, "do you want to talk about religion, too?" and the neighbor said, "Überhaupt nicht!" and they proceeded to say the most awful things about us and we were right there and could hear everything as we tried to just ignore them and keep knocking on doors. It really makes me think, how incredibly rude and inconsiderate people sometimes are, how they can just, ugh, treat us like vermin. i sort of had a "forgive them Father, for they know not what they do" moment, because in reality, they really don't know anything about us, even if they THINK they do, and if they knew who I really was and who I represent and what message I have to share, they wouldn't be like that. A pretty big pill to swallow.

I'm actually curious. Has there been something really big on the news or something about us? This has been the first week of my mission where we didn't find ANYONE at all to set up a new appointment. Sort of discouraging, but I'm praying for people to find that need this message RIGHT NOW, and apparantly I'm still looking for them, maybe we'll find them this week.

Yesterday was Stake Conference in Berlin--pretty neat! There was a broadcast from SLC that we watched-- two guys from the Seventy gave their talks in German (they served in Germany back in the day) so that was cool. I could understand them with their American accent but a few members in our branch was like, "I needed the translation for that guy!" But we heard some cool talks from them, Elder Russel M. Nelson and President Henry B. Eyring.

So yeah, no new apps but two potential baptisms in the future, which hey, I'm of course a lot more happier about the two baptisms, rather than being upset about the rude ladies. Every week is always a new clean start.

Well, I think that's just about it, I write quite a bit, huh? :P Thanks for your words and thanks for your prayers. My sort of "catch phrase" is always, "GEBET: ES FUNCTIONIERT!" Amen to that!

Here's hoping that I'll survive another week of FFO! Bis nächte Woche! Ich habe euch lieeeeeeeeeeeb!
love,
Sis. Whit