Montag, Juni 6, 2011

Hey,

The first full week was good. Just full of doing missionary stuff like appointments and such. It wasn't as good as it could of been because Elder Szvoboda has been a little sick lately. Haha, ya, Elder Szvoboda’s name is interesting. He's Swiss/Hungarian. He's last name is Hungarian and in Czech it means Freiheit which in English means Freedom! But in English, you would pronounce the ‘Szv’ like ‘Sv’ so its like Svoboda. So it’s a good name. He lived in Vietnam before his mission. But he's lived in Switzerland, England and Hungary also. His family is actually moving to Hungry now. Ya, he helps me out. But I don't know if he really knows what its like since German is second nature to him. It's all good though. Ya its still hard to understand the people when they speak but that will come with time when I keep working hard.

Ya, Reimund (the blind man) is pretty cool. He came to church yesterday. We actually had 4 investigator's come to church yesterday and then one less active! It was pretty sweet. The investigators were Reimund, a lady from Romania name Jäger, and then Frau Schulze and her daughter, and she comes out of Venezuela. It was cool when we taught Jäger for the first time - we spoke four different languages in that meeting with her (lol). We spoke to her in German, then she and her daughter would speak Romanian to each other, Elder Szvoboda and I would speak English to each other and then sometimes Elder Szvoboda would speak Hungarian to them because they could understand Hungarian better than German. It was cool. But Jäger was so excited to get a Book of Mormon! We gave her one in Romanian. We actually have the Book of Mormon in 28 different languages just in our apartment, because we run into so many different people here. Like I always carry a German, English, and Turkish Book of Mormon in my backpack. I should probably start carrying a French one, too. We gave a kid a Surbian Book of Mormon the other day, too. He was cool. His name was Savo and he is about 15. But another cool thing is we met with Frau Schulze this past week and she has a baptismal date for the 18th - and she has been praying to know if she is ready for baptism because she thinks she won't be ready by the 18th. And she had this dream, and in this dream she saw this big and really pretty white church, and that there was a fence around. she wanted to go to this really pretty church but she couldn't because there was a fence. We showed her a picture of the Temple and she said that was the picture of the church she saw! She saw the Temple in her dream, and we explained to her that she can't go to the Temple until she gets baptized, and that the gate to the fence represented baptism. So she needs to enter the gate of baptism before she can go to the Temple. Once she started telling the story I knew she had had a dream about the Temple, and you could feel the spirit once she started telling it. It was pretty awesome.

I haven't gotten to go to any of the castles yet. We’re hoping next week we can. It's raining right now so we aren't going today. The castles here are legit, though. They're pretty metal. The ones I have seen, though, all look like ‘castle’ castles (meaning storybook castles).

But ya, they're only about 11 active members in Offenburg. Yesterday was my first Sunday there since the week before was Stake Conference - but we meet in, like, a 4-story building on the first floor. There’s a little chapel and a couple of other rooms in it, though. It's pretty small. We, like, never have appointments with members hardly, because it’s mainly women who come to church. Like, there are 2 mothers who come to church with their small children and only one is married, I believe, and the rest are older, single women. There's only 2 dudes that are active in the ward and the rest are women. So excluding the missionaries, there would only be 2 Priesthood holders.

But that’s all, really, for this week. I forgot to bring my map so I can't tell you all the stakes and wards in our mission. But talk to you later. Love ya. Peace.

[ Elder Caraway ]

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This container says Kümmel, which translates to ‘Caraway’.
So the seeds are Caraway seeds!