9th letter from Hengelo, Netherlands -- Week 45

Elder Ben and Opa (Jan) Steenblik

Elder Ben at Jan Steenblik's house

The "Orange Boyz" Our awesome district

This was our booth -- Elder Cutler, Elder Steenblik and Elder Da Silva

Elder Cutler and Elder Ben  (A selfie, of a selfie.  Mind blowing! Thanks to my freakishly long arms!)

Hey Errbody!

So it has been a long week since P-day was last Saturday, but it was a great week!

On Saturday President and Sister Robinson were in Hengelo.  They called us up and asked us if we wanted to go to dinner with them, so we went to some super fancy restaurant.  We got a nice salmon soup appetizer and then a great big ribeye steak imported from America! Best steak I have had here. President came through big!

Monday was King’s Day and it’s a HUGE holiday here.  It is basically a nation-wide garage sale.  Every city is just full of booths selling stuff and people just take blankets and set out all of their old junk for people to buy.  Our whole district went to Enschede and we rented a booth and gave away Books of Mormon and other stuff.  We had a ton of success! We gave away a ton of Books of Mormon in all sorts of languages and we found some super solid people for the Enschede Elders.  It was a super fun day because it was just a party all day and awesome because EVERYONE wears orange that day.  There was music blasting throughout the city all day, but if I heard one more Pitbull song or the song “Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars, I was going to kill someone! Haha.  My ears were literally ringing all night because of the constant loud music for 9 hours straight.  Great day!

I went on an exchange with Elder Da Silva this week and he is from Brazil.  I was teaching him how to throw a football and it was going great and he was starting to get a nice tight spiral.  I threw it to him and he caught it, but it hurt his finger.  About 30 seconds later his finger was swollen, purple, and crooked! His pinky finger is broken! Ah man, I feel terrible!! I was teaching him how to throw, but skipped the “how to catch it” part.  Now he has to go to the hospital and get that taken care of.  I feel like a terrible human being!

This week we looked up a long lost cousin of mine! He lives in Borne which is a city right next to Hengelo.  His name is Jan Steenblik and we went to his house to meet him.  He was super happy to meet me and invited us both inside.  We talked for a while and he showed us all sorts of old pictures and letters from the Steenblik family.  Jan is 74 years old and his wife died about 8 years ago.  He has a girlfriend who was there as well.  They asked us if we wanted to stay for dinner, so we did! We ate with them and got to know each other.  They had lots of questions about the gospel and about us, so it was really great.  It was super cool to be able to talk to a relative of mine in his native language.  The native language of the Steenblik’s!

We taught Belloh this week about faith and repentance.  She came to church again yesterday, so things are moving along with her.

Anja changed her baptismal date.  We have an appointment with her on Wednesday to talk about it more.  She came to church yesterday and bore her testimony of the gospel.  Hopefully on Wednesday we can pick a new baptismal date with her!

We also found a cool new investigator this week.  Her name is Manuela.  She is Italian, but has been here for about 11 years, so there is a little bit of a language barrier but she speaks enough Dutch to communicate.  She is a Christian woman who loves Jesus and she met the missionaries years ago in Italy.  We are really excited to start teaching her.

It has been a solid week with all of our investigators and also with King’s Day.  We hope to keep busy this week as well!

Have a great week peeps.

                                      -Elder Steenblik