ups and downs

Well, it has been couple of weeks since my last post. As is usual in life, we have had our ups and our downs. There have been a few concerns, but those I will not disclose. Suffice it to say that being a branch president has its worries.

We had our inspection tour, as usual, and enjoyed visiting the missionaries in the St. Gallen Switzerland zone. I am posting a few pictures. We also had a zone conference in Freiburg, Germany. It is quite a drive to get there, but it was a very nice conference. We saw some snow along the road, but other than that, we ask ourselves whether winter has come here at all. There has been no snow to speak of at all here where we are, and temperatures never much below 32 F (0 C).

Some of the fun times we have had lately is with family history with some of our members. One of our members is a very spry 87 years old and has a great zest for life, reminding us of our dearly departed Sister Wilcox back home. She did not have much genealogy done, so I started looking things up for her and found quite a bit, including the report of her grandfather's death in World War I. She had not heard that he died in the war. Sister B has been working on helping another of the members in her family history work, including some records that were mandated by the Nazi government in the 1930's and 1940's. Because of that work, she has a lot of good research information. As Sister B helped her get the information entered into the FamilySearch Tree system, she was pleasantly surprised to find some names were already there, from some of the indexing projects over the years, and that the indexed information exactly matched the records in the family genealogy records that were assembled as part of the Nazi program. If you do not know the history, the Germans were required to prove their genealogy going back a number of generations, in order to prove that they were not Jewish.

Another person we have been helping is a sister who also has a fair amount of information assembled, but not in these kinds of records. It showed that one of her aunts died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. She told us that she was there for trying to help hide some jews during the war. An uncle of hers also died in the war, fighting against the Russians on the eastern front.

It is interesting that our little branch has a functioning Family History Center that has been running for over 20 years, but that the members rarely use it. It is mainly used by non-members who come here to do research.

We had our stake conference last weekend. We had our normal Saturday meetings, but the Sunday meeting was a broadcast session for all of German-speaking Europe. We watched the broadcast in the Dornbirn, Austria chapel. One of the speakers was Elder Bednar. He served his mission in Bavaria 40 years ago and gave his talk entirely in German. The other speakers spoke in English and were translated into German for the broadcast. The focus of the meeting was in finding and bringing back less-active members. That is quite a challenge here. Over the years, people are baptized and then get lost through moving, marriage to non-members and moving. That is part of what I am doing here - trying to find these lost members. It is quite a challenge.

Well, after all that, here are some pictures.

approaching Lake Constance

The ferry across Lake Constance (Bodensee)

The mountains near Ebnat

The elders in Konstanz

The above pictures were from our inspection tour. The next ones are from Zone Conference in Freiburg.

crossing a bridge system on the way to Freiburg

through a canyon long the train line

some statues and the traffic in Freiburg

getting ready for a picture of the zone - Freiburg chapel

Sister missionaries with Sister Miles (mission president's wife) and Sister B on each end.

 We had district meeting in our apartment. The elders had an assignment and were working on it as I took the pictures.

 This is a church and an old house in Fischbach, a part of the city of Friedrichshafen, Germany. If you look closely on the old house, you will see a pair of ice skates hanging in the window.

 We found this ostrich farm near the town of Waldburg. Below is the small fortress of Waldburg, situated on a hill in the middle of the town.

Early February report

This one will be a fairly random collection of notes and pictures. The first picture (above) shows our refrigerator. It is only a surface of about 23 by 32 inches (a small refrigerator) so you see we have trouble putting up family things on it. This is after we opened all our christmas love chain notes.

Now for the rest of the blog entry. We have had some good experiences so I will summarize a few of them first.

On Sunday, we invited one of the couples of the branch to lunch with us at our place. She is a member (our Primary president) and her husband is not a member but comes all the time with (or without) her. The stake auditor was here from Switzerland as well so we invited him to join us. The sister is Russian by birth and the auditor speaks many languages so there was quite a number of languages spoken at the dinner table. It was fun.

Last night (while we are talking about it) we invited another couple to eat dinner with us - the Relief Society president and her husband (both long-time members). It was very enjoyable.

On Tuesday, we had our Zone Training meeting in Singen, Germany. The picture above is of a peak where there is a castle ruin. It is along the road near Singen. We drove and took the elders with us. As usual, it was a very inspiring meeting and I picked up a number of good points I am going to be presenting to our members in the next few weeks. The main point is the importance of pure and mighty prayer. I will probably make a separate entry in this blog about my thoughts.

After returning home from Singen, Germany, I dropped off the elders and Sister B and immediately picked up my two counselors, both waiting at our place, and we drove to St. Gallen, Switzerland for a meeting with the stake presidency. We gave a report of the previous year and received counsel from them. Again, it was stressed the power of prayer in this work. It was definitely in concert with what I heard at our training meeting earlier in the day.

We had a nice meeting with one of our families on Monday evening where we gave them a copy of the Book of Mormon stories for children in German. Here is a picture of the boys with their ship made out of Lego® blocks. The older boy was trying to make it like the Titanic. It was an amazing construction.

On Thursday (yesterday) we met with the Trautmanns (my first counselor and his wife) and we helped her with their genealogy. Sister B did most of the work. I tried to solve some of the technical problems, with little success, but it eventually worked. She was able to prepare a number of her close family names for temple work. Sister B says it was one of the highlights of her time on our mission. After that, I took a number of pictures of the area around their home. It was irresistible. The skies were so clear and we could see across the Bodensee (Lake Constance) to the Swiss alps.

We saw these hot air balloons on the way to the Trautmanns.

I thought it interesting to see this old house on the farm with all the satellite dishes on the side of the house.

 Now, for the rest of the random pictures and notes...

There are many of these speed signs along the road. It shows you your speed and then either a smileyface or a frown depending on your speed. Also very often are the photocop blitzers. So far, we have only been blitzed once. That one only cost us about $18.

As we were filling up at the station, I saw this little car thing that I sometimes see on the road (enlarged below). They drive right along with the traffic, but quite slowly. And.. as a side note, it costs us about the equivalent of $8.00 per gallon here.

Languages

We are experiencing some wonderful times teaching people in different languages. I have mentioned a few before, but wanted to list a couple again today. The first one is a report that Sister B sent as an email to some of the family, so some of you have already seen this.

"Just a quick story.  I have to tell you about a visit we made this evening to our Macedonian family.  They are learning some German, but since church materials, like the Book of Mormon, aren't available in their Macedonian, they can read the Serbian church materials we had already brought them fairly well.  The Elders ordered a Preach my Gospel in Macedonian/Serbian and brought it tonight.  So while they were speaking in simple German, telling them where in the books to read, and trying to teach, I played with their two little girls.  The eldest is in first grade and is learning German and how to read it.  So we had ordered the children's Book of Mormon stories in German.  So between the two of us we read the first chapter which is the Joseph Smith story.  Both girls were fascinated especially with the pictures of God and Jesus.  After we were done, we played our favorite game, taking turns drawing a picture and then writing next to it what it is called in German, English, and Macedonian.  While we were playing their two friends from the next room came in and joined us, telling what the objects were in Arabic.  So are you lost on languages or nationalities yet?  One more to go.  There was a knock on the door, and their adult friends from upstairs came in.  The mom is Italian and her son is part Italian and Turkish.  They speak German very well, and joined in their lesson.  At the end they requested two Book of Mormons.  What an evening!  We had 12 people in their living/bedroom area which is about half the size of your front room.  And it was wonderful!"

The other one was today during church. One of our families has a daughter with children who has a live-in nanny from the Ivory Coast in Africa. This nanny is a young woman, probably about 25 and her native language is French. She has expressed an interest in the church and the Book of Mormon since she visited our Christmas party in December. When she comes to church, the elders teach her during the Sunday school class time. Today we talked about the plan of salvation and I was able to be with them. We used some of the scriptures in the Gospel Library app on my iPad to find the scriptures in French for her. She speaks and understands German pretty well, but it is hard for her to understand some of these religious concepts in German and does better by reading in French. It was a very good lesson and we were able to help her understand the pre-existence and the fall of Adam because of the French scriptures available from the church.

It is interesting to see the collection of languages we have for the Book of Mormon. We ordered a number of languages a while back and they sent us a number of books in languages we really don't need. We now have three copies of the Book of Mormon in Navajo, a number in Tongan, Samoan, Tahitian, Laotian, besides the ones we wanted in the european and african languages. It is a great blessing to have so many languages available. I just wish I understood and could speak more languages.

The Lord is truly helping us to hasten the work!