"every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language " (D&C 90:11)

Can you tell I have language on the brain?!

The missionaries in our mission are finding investigators who speak neither Dutch or English. With refugees pouring into Europe this will happen much more often. President Bunnell gave us an assignment a few months ago.  We are to gather the names of members of the Church in our mission who are fluent in languages other than Dutch and English. The missionaries then contact us with their language needs and we connect them with a translator.  It has been amazing! We have gathered the names of about 50 people who speak 24 different languages. We have had requests for Arabic, Farsi, Portuguese, and Mongolian!  We had translators for all but Mongolian.  With Pres. Bunnell's help we were able to contact the Mongolian mission and arranged translation via Skype for a lesson with an investigator.

  “ For it shall come to pass in that day, that every man shall hear the fullness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language, through those who are ordained unto this power by the administration of the Comforter, shed forth upon them for the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

 We are witnessing the fulfillment of this prophecy! It is a privilege to be part of bringing the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who seek it!

Langzaam praaten, alsjeblieft!

          We continue our Dutch lessons….. it is oh….so…..slow!  We meet over Skype with our teacher for an hour and our learning coach for another hour on Tues. nights.  The MTC offers senior couples language lessons for 6 months so our lessons will soon be coming to an end.  Our progress has been slow.  We do have a much bigger vocabulary now and can read many signs.  We’ve discovered we can read the little children’s story in the Dutch Liahona : ) We can pray fairly well in church, but can’t yet pour out our hearts to God in prayer in Dutch!

 Our sweet neighbor, Ineka continues to be our best assistant for learning Dutch.  We meet and just talk in Dutch.  I usually have something to tell her that I have practiced in Dutch.   She corrects it for me. We talk about what I want to learn and how I really want to be able to understand what is said in the meetings at church.  One of the kindest gestures we have received here came from Ineka.  Although she says she “doesn’t believe” in God, she came over one day with the Lord’s Prayer translated into Dutch, to help us at church.  I was so touched by her thoughtfulness.  It wasn’t an easy task.  Yesterday she came over with two books she had checked out from the Zeist library for us.  “Dutch for Dummies” and a children’s book with 1,000 Dutch/English words!  How can we not be successful with such love and kindness!

On the first Sunday in Jan. we attended Fast and Testimony meeting in Groningen.  For the first time I understood some of what they were saying!  It felt like a big breakthrough!  I’m sure part of the reason was because many testimonies have similar phrases and because we have been studying the “Missionary vocabulary and Phrase” book.  It was very exciting! 

That said, it has been frustrating that we still can’t follow the talks/lessons at church.  Even though we recognize more words it’s not enough.  Some of the problem is that everyone speaks so fast the words blur together.  I want to yell “langzaam praaten, alsjeblieft!”  (speak slowly, please!).  When people speak slowly we can understand so much more. 

Which brings me to this realization….learning and understanding a language of any kind requires as much or more effort in listening as it does in speaking.  So we have our learning coach get someone to share 5 min. talks in Dutch on a church subject during our lesson so we can practice listening.  We speak up and ask people to speak slowly and repeat what they said.  We are working on listening… not just what we want to say.

Which brought me to another thought.  In the language of prayer, is listening not the hardest part?  Do we want to pour out our hearts to God without the same effort given to listening?  Do we understand what God is saying to us?  Do we understand the language of personal revelation?  Instead of “speak slowly, please”, do we want to say to God, “speak loudly, please!)?  Just as the Dutch are frustrated when we don’t understand, so our Heavenly Father must be when we don’t listen/understand what He is trying to tell us.  I know that receiving personal revelation is like learning a language, that we can practice listening, and we can learn to hear and understand what God has to tell us.  I know that He wants to take us by the hand and guide us through our mortal journey if we will but learn to listen.

These amazing Young Single Adults!

You might have noticed the lack of news about our service with the YSA’s in our recent blog posts. 

 Well, not for having no news to post! 

We began Dec. with the winter YSA “camp”.  It is for all YSA’s in the mission.  It was held at a camp in a National Preserve near us.  Notice the bike parking sign “Fietsen”!  There were about 40 kids.  It started on Friday night with a crazy animal dance and ended on Sunday with Sacrament meeting.  The kitchen and gathering room is in the front of this building and the sleeping quarters in the back half of the building. 

These YSA’s can really work!  They plan and run the whole weekend.  The senior couples mostly come for support. 

They began the day Saturday with a “quest” in the forest.  There were 8 stations, manned by senior couple “angel guides” who gave the teams an assignment when they arrived, then “guided” them on the way to the next station.

We were instructed to bring a white sheet to complete our costumes!  It was a  very cold that day in the woods!  At our station they had to make a doll out of materials they could scavenge.  We then gave them some clues to a scripture and sent them on their way.

 

Good job!!

They had an indoor picnic complete with all the decorations.  After lunch they cleared everything and had a workshop.

Dinner that night was traditional Dutch “stomppot” and “hutspot”.  That meant peeling 40 pounds of potatoes and chopping 8 pounds of onions!  The alternative was to just stand around so I made myself useful!  Femke was the cook, a darling YSA from Den Bosch that I just love.

Two big pots….hutspot (mashed potatoes with carrots and onions) on the left and endive stomppot (mashed potatoes with endive) on the right.  They served mounds of it the size of their plates piled 3 inches high!  (and they ate the whole thing! Rookworst rounded out the dinner. 

They finished the day by completely re-decorating the hall and having a Sinterklaas party, complete with Sinterklass and Swarte Piet. (swarte as you can guess is the Dutch

word for “black” : ).   It was an all-new cultural experience for us!

It is bigger than Christmas here.  There were presents for everyone, games and the YSA’s loved it! 

The camp was concluded on Sunday with breakfast, a devotional (guest speaker), lunch, then Sacrament meeting.  These YSA’s are so capable.  They did literally everything and it was done to the nth degree! 

We express our appreciation to President Bunnell who graciously had the mission house the senior couples in a hotel nearby so we didn't have to sleep with the kids in the camp bunks!

                                                                                                              

We continued to have institute in Dec.  to finish out the semester.  The big dance of the year for the YSA’s in this mission is the Christmas dance which is always held in Den Haag.  Like all their activities it was beautifully decorated and well organized. 

The fellow we don’t know (lol!) but the girls are from left to right in the back; Esmee, Julia, Stephanie and Amber.

Inda is in front with us.  Joe got the bow tie as his Sinterklaas gift at the Oostveens Sinterklaas party and we thought this was the perfect occasion to wear it!  It turned out that most of the fellows were wearing bow ties!  Who knew?!  The girls were all dressed up in their fancy Christmas best! 

There was more food than kids by about 10 times and I’m sure the music was heard the next block over so it was a total success! 

Some of our favorite YSA’s invited us to go ice skating with them on the very tiny ice rectangle they made on the plaza in Zeist.  It was so fun to be with our young friends!

We have had a two week break from teaching/cooking for institute twice a week.  It has been a welome respite but we are getting anxious to get going again!  Happy New Year to you all!  

Getting around; the good, the bad and the terrifying!

We have been driving 4 1/2 months now.  Although it's not anything like driving in Manila, Philippines, it is different and we are older!

 The good....we are to the point that we can get some places without Miss GPS.  It's nice to be able to drive without being on high alert every minute! 

            We have figured out the detour system when there is road construction.  Miss GPS doesn’t know when a road is temporarily closed due to construction and just keeps “re-calculating route” right back to the closed road!  They have an alphabet system of detour signs.  So if you come to some road construction, look for the letter and follow those signs….for instance this “B”.  There might be other letters but you ignore them and follow your letter bread crumb trail! 

We have grown used to having a traffic light for every lane.  If the intersection is traffic light controlled, each and every lane has it’s own light, including the bus lane, the pedestrian lane and the bike lane.  It is easy to miss your light as you approach and see this wide array of lights!       This picture is too small for you to see the bike and pedestrian lights on the right.  We are getting better at zeroing in on our lane!

The good and the bad….

            If you are a bicyclist, the little bike traffic lights are wonderful!  Green bike you go, red bike you stop. Also if you are a car…you know who has the right of way.  In all instances the bike has the right of way if there is an incident…green light or no. 

The bad is on a dark, rainy night the bicyclists are still out and it is so very hard to see them!  We are both on high alert on those nights! 

This is one of the intersections in downtown Zeist.  The motorbike on the right has a blue license plate so can drive on the bike path, not the road.  Watch out for them buzzing past you!  We are always watching for bikes, buses, other cars, people and motorized wheelchairs as we drive around town.  For that reason, if we leave Zeist we drive, if we do errands around Zeist we bike.  Much easier; less stressful, takes about the same amount of time, no cost and hassle finding a parking place and great exercise! 

The roads here are perfectly paved.  We hadn’t seen a single crack or pothole in a road until we got to a parking lot last week and the parking lot was full of potholes.  A first here for us.  Most of the bike paths are equally smooth.   There is only one place between here and our nearest grocery store that if we’re not careful bumping over the crack in the bike path we find an egg

or two cracked when we get home! 

This is the first dirt road we’ve seen.  We laughed at the 60 km/hr speed limit!  Around towns the speed limit is always 30 km/hr, maybe 50 km/hr if you are on the outskirts of town.  Very slow…We didn’t try 60 on this road : ) 

The terrifying; driving in the downtown of any size town or city is terrifying! (youtube "biking in Utrecht centrum!)The roads are narrow, the bike paths are the  same size, signs are confusing and there is so many cars, bikes and people it’s crazy!  We go to great lengths to avoid driving in the city centrums!  In Utrecht we either park outside the city centrum and walk 15-20 min. in or we ride the bus from just outside our front door. 

We were checking missionary apartments last month.  One of our assigned apartments is above the McDonalds (yea for me!!) right on the city centrum plaza in Almere.  We had googled it, put Miss GPS on it, talked to others who had been there and headed into town.  We ended up in an alley by a market.  That wasn’t right.  We headed back down the alley and saw a little underground pass.  Someone had told us we needed to go through an underpass.  (all this time Miss GPS was repeating over and over “you have reached your destination”, which we clearly hadn’t!).  Remember we are in the city centrum, there are people, bikes, buses, and cars everywhere. So we headed into the underpass.  I could see a parking garage but no entrance. Just into the underpass (by now we are both pretty stressed out) I said with amazement “Wow, here we are in the city centrum and there’s NO traffic”!  10 seconds later Joe says with just a bit of panic “we’re in the bus lane”!  Indeed, I had driven down under the city centrum bus terminal into the bus garage area!  Bus lanes here are sacred and no one ever drives in them!  We  drove for 3 blocks like scared rabbits until we came out on the other side of the centrum.  We turned on the first side street we could find and parked.  We called the missionaries, told them we would be late and googled mapped it from our car to their apartment.  We happily walked the 20 minutes to the apartment!  We have now been there 4 times and finally found the close, cheap parking lot near the apartment.  

We go some places with ease, we have had only 1 speeding ticket and 2 parking tickets (a good mission record apparently!), and know where to avoid if at all possible!  Not bad for oldies in a new place!

  

What's not to love about missionaries?

   Our missionary activities started early in Dec. with our Zone Conference.  This time we had a visiting General Authority, Elder Johnson.  Three zones met together so we fed 90 people for lunch.  Elder Van Der Put asked me to be in charge of the lunch (me? The non-food soul?!)  I called my go-to-Sister Senior missionary, Zuster Hill and she worked it out with me.  (what will I do when she goes home in March? : ( ! 

We are the tiny couple in the middle of the back row! This is half of the mission!  President and Zuster Bunnell are 2^nd and 3^rd from the left, front row. 

 The song we sing to celebrate birthdays at Zone Conference....think our very own "haka" dance!  

 

 We had a district p-day ice skating activity.  In our town of Zeist, they put up a very small rectangular ice rink on the plaza in the centrum.  It had been quite cold but warmed up a little that day… lots of fun!

For the first time we had district meeting at our house instead of meeting at the chapel in Gouda. It was so nice to cook and serve from my own kitchen!  

It’s transfer week next week….we will miss the missionaries moving on.  We come to love them so much as we work and learn together.  

With the missionaries moving from time to time, their mail needs to go to the mission office.  It is distributed at zone conferences.  Because it’s Christmas, lots of packages and mail arrived after our zone conference on the 8^th.  So the senior couples went to Leiden to become Santa’s elfs!  The office elders helped us stuff it all into our car!  All of the senior couples have 7-8 missionary apartments they inspect quarterly.  We took the packages for our eight apartments.  We delivered to Almere, Hilversum, Amersfoorte, Gouda (2), Utrecht, Nieuwegein, and Den Bosch.  Including our trip to Leiden to pick it up, we drove 548 kilometers! Or 340 miles! The missionaries were so happy to get their Christmas from home that it was worth all the hours on the road! 

While in Leiden all the senior couples had lunch at our favorite pannekoekenhuis….lekker! (yummy!).  They are very large crepes that have sweet or savory toppings.  You cut them up or roll them, whichever you like. 

Our whole group, including the mission President in front of our favorite windmill in Leiden centrum.

The best part of Christmas was the beautiful Christmas program we had in the Utrecht Ward on Christmas Day and having 4 of our missionaries over for Christmas dinner and Skyping with their families.  Between our 2 laptops, 2 iPads, and 2 iPhones, all 5 of us were able to talk to our families at the same time! 

When I think of how hard it was to call home when we moved to Asia in 1999 I am so very grateful for the advancement of technology!  We talked to our kids and Mom several times each over the course of 24 hours!

It was hard to be far away from our families but these missionaries we love, both young and old, made it warm and a lot less lonely! 

(rear view mirrors for our bikes....we aren't Dutch...we need them!)  And Christmas love and jammies from home!

Christmas is.........

Christmas is BIG in America….and not so big in the Netherlands.  It was mid-Dec. before we saw a Kerstbomen (Christmas tree) lot.  We were fortunate, our dear friends the Oostveens had an extra tree complete with lights that they offered to let us use.  Also the use of their darling daughter Julia to decorate the house for us while I cooked for our YSA party!

 We missed the Den Bosch ward Christmas party due to Joe’s being sick and the Utrecht ward didn’t have a party.  The English speaking ward in Zoetermeer joined with another ward and had a wonderful Christmas program on Sunday evening the 11^th.  There was a large choir, strings, piano and vocalists….the Christmas hymns in Dutch and English along with the Christmas story narrative. It was the real kick off for Christmas for us.  I’m sorry I didn’t take any pictures! 

One of the highlights of our Christmas season was the open house we hosted for our neighbors!  We decided we needed to get to know the so created an invitation to take around.  It was hard to go out in the dark to knock on the doors of strangers.  (think missionary work every single day!)  To our surprise everyone who answered the door was enthusiastic and excited!  One neighbor commented that it was too bad it took Americans to move in to get the neighborhood together!  It turns out almost all of the neighbors didn’t know one another!

 So I prepared Dutch treats (snoepjies), went to our local cheese store and got a cheese tray, made mini banana muffins and hot spiced apple cider.  We had no idea if everyone (we invited 20 households) or no one would come!

We had 25 of the kindest, warmest neighbors come!  They were so excited to meet each other.  One family brought 2 children.  I had made play dough and set up a kids table to entertain any children who came.  The kids loved the play dough!  The adults stood around the table, visited and ate for an hour and a

half!

We played a Tabernacle Choir Christmas program on our TV as background music. 

They viewed it more as a “housewarming” and all brought presents!  Mostly beautiful flowers. 

We didn’t RSVP on the invitations but we received lovely notes from some of those who couldn’t come.  It was so sweet. They all want to do it again so we will organize another social in the spring.   It turned out to be a wonderful evening and hopefully the neighbors have had a positive experience with Latter Day Saints! 

We also got in an hour or so of Christmas shopping in the Gouda Centrum.  We delivered Christmas packages to the elders there and it looked so enticing we decided to stay and shop!  And of course I need those hot, yummy “frites” (fries) they sell on the plazas : ) ! 

Although we missed our family this season, between our neighbors, missionaries, YSA’s and the warm greetings from home we felt the love of the Savior and our Heavenly Father : )  

What do you do when your companion is sick and you have to stay in?!

To those who know me, this needs no explanation!

It's been a couple very slow days stuck in the house.  I have a new appreciation for missionaries when their companions are too sick to work.  

We found this puzzle while shopping in a bookstore.  This week was the perfect time to get it out!  It kept me sane while allowing me to enjoy one of our Christmas traditions from home.  win-win.....