11th letter from Hengelo, Netherlands -- Week 47

A missionary and his bike  -- Elder Ben

Elder Ben 

Hey folks!

To start the week off, on Tuesday, we got to go to school! We eat dinner with a nonmember family every week and the mom is a school teacher at a local school.  She asked us if we could come and give presentations to her classes and her students are 12-13 years old.  Man, what a humbling experience.  If you are ever learning a foreign language and start to think that it is coming along, just go give a presentation to a class of 12 year olds! Hahaha.  For the first 2 class periods we just talked about the differences of America and the Netherlands and what America is like.  They all had tons of questions and I talked a little about football.  Most of them have heard of American football, but never actually seen it. I pulled a video up on the projector of football big hits.  They thought that it was the sickest thing they have ever seen! Haha.  It was awesome! Everyone's dream here is to one day go to America.  The 13 year old girls were more than excited to meet 2 nicely dressed young men from America ;) .  For the last 2 class periods, we went to the English classes and talked with the students in English and they were 16 years old.  We weren’t allowed to preach about our religion, but they actually had lots of questions about what we believe.  We answered all of their questions and ended up basically teaching a whole restoration lesson.  Afterwards, we got to go chill in the TEACHERS LOUNGE! Every kids dream! The school felt very similar to a normal American school.  Super cool experience to go be a teacher for a day! Hopefully, years down the road when these kids meet the missionaries on the street, they will remember the 2 goofy American kids that came to their school.

We had a Zone Conference in Rotterdam on Thursday and we spent the night with the Rotterdam Elders the night before.  For the 2nd part of the conference, we got to hear from the singing elders.  There are 4 elders in our mission who travel around and put on singing devotionals.  They were so dang good!

Friday I went on an Exchange in Deventer with Elder Andrew (my beloved MTC companion) and we had a great time together.  After we ate lunch, we had to run out of the apartment to catch the bus.  We got to the bus stop and Elder Andrew just said "Crap!" He had forgotten the keys, so I told him that we could just call the zone leaders and ask them to bring the keys.  Then he said "Crap!" He had also forgotten the Phone! Haha.  We had to ask some random dude on the street to use his phone so we could call for a set of keys. 

Saturday we had our interviews with President Robinson.  Last interviews ever with him.  We will be getting our new mission President on July 1^st, I think.

We met with family Torosian’s this week and they had friends visiting from Syria.  The friends spoke broken English and the Torosian’s speak broken Dutch, and then they spoke Arabic with each other.  Communicating was sure an experience!

Guess what? Elder England plays the mouth organ! (Known to some of you as the harmonica.) I make him play me some "Home on the Range" every night before we go to bed.  Very awesome!

Well, things here are going great! I will be getting transferred next Wednesday, but I won’t know where until Sunday night.

Have a fantastic week!

                              -Elder Steenblik