9th letter from Eindhoven, Netherlands -- Week 57

Yup

This is the new motto that Elder Reese and I are going to live our lives by.  "Do T-Swift!"

Goedemorgen Meisjes!

This week has been a little all over the place.  The first couple days of the week we couldn’t get anything going.  Our appointments cancelled and nobody that we looked up was home.  Everyone here is on vacation! Every summer the schools and businesses go on break for a couple of weeks, and basically everyone leaves on vacation! The people that actually stay home have the mindset that they are on vacation, so they don’t answer the door or want to talk about anything. It is super hard to find people. We will knock 15 doors and only 1 or 2 people will be home.

I was on an exchange this week with Elder Leishman on Tuesday and Elder Crowder on Wednesday. They are both greenies and have only been here for 2 weeks.  They are great! They speak super good Dutch and are extremely hard workers.  I stayed in Eindhoven for both of the exchanges and we spent a lot of time finding.  One of the ways we have found to keep busy during these vacation weeks is doing service for people.  We helped a man in his garden this week and he was grateful for that.

On Thursday we went on splits with 2 of the ward members.  I went with Harry.  It is crazy because he is 85 years old and still bikes around with us and does missionary work.  Boss!

Friday, I was on an exchange in Vlissingen with Elder Reese.  We spent the whole day on public transportation! Vlissingen is all the way on the coast and it is a really big area, so we spent hours and hours on buses and trains that day.  We had some good lessons with their investigators.  We taught a guy from India who is some sort of Rebel group leader fighting for religious freedom.  The government issued a death penalty on him, so he had to flee here.  Then he met the missionaries on the street the other day and has been taking the lessons.  Super cool dude! I also wore a helmet for the first time that day.  Oh man! People already yell at us and honk, but in that space of 1 hour where I was wearing a helmet, I had more people yell at me than I have in the past 6 months! Hahaha.  We are special.

We met with Umu this week and were able to set a baptismal date for the 29th of August.  Things are just dandy with her.

We had another missionary get home in our ward this week.  On Sunday, he invited us to his open house after church to go talk to some of his nonmember friends.  Before we left, he gathered everyone together and asked us to give a spiritual thought.  In front of like 30 people, we just whooped out a spiritual thought about families.  All of the nonmembers seemed to like it.  Who doesn’t love a message about eternal families???

Well, that’s it for this week!

Keep it phresh.

                                   -Elder Steenblik