Week 51: Elder Nielsen!!!

Ya, we are going to try to get on [Christmas Day] at 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., we will see. We still don’t have solid plans for that yet. I’m not sure where I will be for Christmas day or Tweede Kerst. We had a good dinner appointment with this one really really cool family in the ward, they have 7 kids who are half American so they speak English and are just cool. We were going there for the 24th to eat and games and get haircuts for free. Then we were told we aren’t allowed to do 4 man dinners, not even for Christmas… so now the other elders will go instead of us and we have no one. We have maybe someone from the English ward which will be really cool though if it works. Christmas day we have nothing… I don’t have much motivation to arrange anything. We did have a dinner but then it got stolen from us by the sisters… so we have nothing then. I will try to go to the ward mission leaders. I just wanna go there and Skype, play a few board games, then go home and watch “Meet the Mormons” or something, haha, have a chill day. Then the next day is second Christmas or Tweede Kerst and we have an appointment with a super dope family from the English ward.

So yes, I finally got to see Matt! I was at the church early to shovel snow and then all of the sudden I see down the street Matt running towards me and I ran and gave him a hug. It was just really chill and nice to have a little piece of home. We sat with each other at the conference and we did good at not talking the entire time, we paid attention. I hope Prez saw that we could contain ourselves, maybe he will put us closer, haha. We talked a lot during lunch which was weird cause we talked about all the people we both knew. So weird. Of course we took some photos which I will upload! Oh wow, that is super nice of the Bishop and his wife!!! Thanks!

A bit about my week... we had a dinner appointment with this one family. We had never really talked much to them, at church so we wanted to get to know them at the dinner. They are a super cool fam! Both parents served missions, France and Japan. Their kids are super cute. A really funny thing happened. We were all eating and 2 of their boys were calling each other names, one said stupid, the other said dumb, then one said homo and the parents were both shocked and were like, don’t say that! Then the younger daughter says “what does homo mean?" It was just such a funny moment.

We had a good appointment with F., an investigator of ours. She is really soft spoken and kind and finds it difficult to have faith. I was talking to her and explaining how faith always starts small and then all of the sudden she interupted and said that she will come to church. So we told her we would meet her at the tram stop and walk with her to the building. She said okay and we agreed on a time. Fast forward to Sunday and we went to pick her up and there was no one there. We waited and nothing... super sad, we really expected her to be there. Disappointment was kinda the theme of the week. We had a ton of appointments with people however almost every single one of them fell through.

One appointment that did go through was with our cool Turkish family we are teaching. We get there and they are having a bday party with like 10, 14 year old girls all over the place. So we had to cram into the tiny kitchen to have a lesson. The wife had made us soup, homemade soup just for us! It was so so nice of her to do that, even though she was so busy with her family and kids. They all left into another room so we could go into it. The husband doesn't speak very good Dutch or English and was really happy we had the BoM in Turkish. He really wanted more church books in Turkish. There aren’t too many but then we realized that he could download the Gospel Library and change the language and then see what's there. So we downloaded it for him and there was a lot of stuff, Liahona articles as well as conference talks and other resources. It was great for him. He loves to read, loves to read. He read so much about Mormons on the internet and knows a lot of our church history, and from what he was saying it was all accurate. I just feel good knowing that now he has the app so he can read the accurate info about us. Something else cool is they had a friend there helping with the party and she joined the lesson. The husband and wife took a moment to tell her what they knew and what we taught them to teach her. They did it in Turkish, so now she also knows about the gospel. She even tried to point out flaws and they defended us! It was so cool. She asked why we don’t drink coffee and before I could answer the wife said because it was addicting and that she thinks it is a good idea. She herself is addicted to coffee, haha. She wants to stop. It is just really cool to see them progressing. Once they come to church they will be golden. They want to come but it snowed a foot so they didn’t, understandable. I just love them so much though!

We had a baptism here. It was one of the sisters. It was really really beautiful. The convert has been investigating for a while. She has great member support. She actually planned the whole service herself with lots of musical numbers. Everybody loved it and she looked so happy the whole time. Echt een geestelijke ervaring.

We also got called by the temple Prez to come help do baptisms at the temple in case anyone came. So we go over and started talking with the temple prez. He is a really cool guy. No one came but we had to wait so we ended up talking with him for 2 hours. He told us really cool stuff about missionary work and about the gathering of Israel and, wow, he knows so much about a lot of things. It was super cool to talk with him one on one. He served his mission here, then came back on a couples mission, then served as mission prez here, then served another couples mission here, then got called as the temple prez here. So he is actually American but can speak Dutch well and pretty much seems Dutch.

I think I forgot to mention this, but on Sunday last week one of the office couples came up to me at church and told me that I have been assigned as the new “Ikea Elder” which means I get a car and I help out when apartments need new furniture or when things need to be moved or thrown out.  Elder Steele was the old one but then he died [ie. finished his mission].  So now I am it!  I really wanted to do it cause it is fun.  I’m excited.  Also, they usually have the strong elders do it, haha.  So at zone conference I had to do a driving test with Elder Van Der Put, him and his wife are the office couple in charge of apartments.  I drove with him so he could see if I am a good driver, I passed.  The assignment is mission wide, so I could be driving to Belgium.

Questions:
1. How was the weather this week?  Is there still snow on the ground?
2. Do you know yet what the Dutch do for Christmas?
3. How was the work this week?
4. Did you have dinner appointments?
5. Tell me about Zone Conference?  Did you get your parcels?
6. What are your plans for Christmas Day?
7. Does the snowy wet weather make it difficult to get around?
8. Is there a Gospel topic that you have been studying lately?

1. cold windy rainy, wet, dark. the usual. no more snow left.
2. vieren... uh idk. the usual stuff like we do back home.
3. good, besides the dropped appointments. we have a cool new investigator. she really liked the plan of salvation.
4. one. but this next week we have 4 so it'll be fun!!!
5. twas good. yes I did thanks!
6. idk
7. no, it's not too bad. just annoying getting wet all the time.
8. het heilsplan! I love the plan of salvation and I think it is really relatable to people and that people have interest in it. I always try to lead it back to the BOM in contacts.

that is all, hou doe!

#LightTheWorld 2017

(link to the 25 days advent calendar at https://www.mormon.org/christmas/25-ways-25-days)

some good looking snowelders!

Elders Fernhout and Balthar

Elders Nielsen and Fernhout

Week 50: Sneeuw en Sinterklaas!

Well Dec. 5th was Sinterklaas, which is a very popular holiday here. It is like Christmas, however not the same with all of the presents. What normally happens is you and a group of people all put names in a hat or something then you draw a name out secretly and you have to make that person a present out of cardboard or something. Then you write them a poem and get them a real present and you put those things inside of the thing you made. So for example, I had my companion Elder Ballard and he likes basketball, so I made him a shoe and then inside I put my present which was mints and an umbrella. Then I wrote a poem about the present and him and Sinterklaas. It was fun. We went over to our ward mission leader's house to celebrate with the other Zoetermeer missionaries. There were some really well done presents, it was awesome. There was a lot of Dutch treats like pepernoten en kruidnoten en other snoepjes [sweets]. It was great, Dave, WML, dressed up like Zwarte Piet who is Sints little helper.  There are a bunch of them, so for example, there is spying Piet who looks in your window to see if you are good and present Piet. We also listened to a lot of typical Sinterklaas songs, or liedjes, in het Nederlands. It was great. A lot of kids dress up for it for school, they go as Black Piet. Oh and the bad kids get shipped off to Spain, ahha. There were Zwarte Piets all over Zoetermeer that day, just walking around, some throwing pepernoten at people, good stuff.

Well we had a lot of appointments set up this week and we had a lot of them fall through sadly. We almost lost someone but Elder Ballard said I saved it. We managed to set up a return appointment and she said she will read in the book. Ya, it has been really cold here and people don’t like to open their door for very long to talk to us or stop on the Streets in the rain or snow… we did have a good appointment with a Surinamese guy who we found last week.  He has a really funny Surinamese accent, all his w’s are actually w’s instead of v’s. Anyway, we will see how our next app with him goes. That night we also had a really fun dinner appointment! which is always sick. Then after that we went to an appointment we had with a potential and we called up a member to see if he could meet us there and he did. He made the appointment so much better. He connected wth the investigator really well and now we have a new investigator! sick.

So on Friday Wouter called us and said he needed our help at the farm. So we went over and he had a problem. He has a chute in his barn where food pellets come out and a cow managed to hit it and 3000 kilograms of food poured out… we had to clean it all up, haha. Oh and there are grates where the cows poop goes down and the food fell in there. So much of it that we had to get in there and scoop it out. That was my job. I got some good pics of that. So that was a good start to the day. We got some oliebollen on our way home.

We went to young mens that night, Elder Balthar and I took the tram because it was snowing.  Elder Ballard wanted to bike and Elder Occon went with him.  Elder Ballard got lost on the bike ride there. It was bad because it was dark and snowing and he doesn’t really know his way there on the bikes. About 20 mins later he showed up and he wasn’t happy, ahha. We helped the young men and women set up the church for Christmas and for the Stake Conference on Sunday. I had a really good time. There were a lot of members there and they had music playing and it was snowing outside and we were setting up for Christmas and people were happy, it was so fun I thought. I helped tie bows for the Christmas tree. It was great. Sunday was crazy, we had Stake Conference with hundreds of members there, way too many for that building. Also, we had almost 40 missionaries, so I saw so many people, it was great. Not only that but it snowed like 6 inches during the conference, which was insane for here. First time that has happened since 2007. So that was great. Then that night we had a dinner appointment and we arranged for 2 investigators to come and it all went perfectly well. They loved it and the members did a really good job. So happy about that! Other than that, the week was full of looking people up and walking in the cold and handing out BOMs, like a lot of them. It was a good week.

Questions:
1.  Did you go anywhere this week?
2.  How was the work?
3.  Has the Samsung camera come in very handy?
4.  Have you met Sister Lowry from Pincher Creek?
5.  I like your Christmas decorations :) Is that in your living room?  Where are the stockings from?
6.  You have zone conference this week on the 12th?  Do you know if they are doing anything special for it for Christmas? And you think you will get to see Matt?  (That will be so awesome…can’t wait to hear about it).
7.  Did you have many dinner appointments this week?
8.  Did the ward have the Christmas Dinner yet, if so, how was it?

1. Nowhere exciting, Den Haag for district meeting.
2. Great.
3. Ya kinda, I downloaded Zoetermeer map so I can use it.
4. I heard about her but have not met her yet.
5. Ya, haha, they were just in the apartment.
6. Ya we do, tomorrow! probably, idk, and yes I will!
7. Like 2, ya but it's dying down. We used to have a calendar they could sign up on but now that is not allowed so they can’t do that which they don't like so we get fewer appointments.
8. Not yet, soon, I think it's the 23.

That is all, hou doe,

Elder Fernhout

Sinterklaas at Ward Mission Leader's home

School kid dressed up as Zwarte Piet

Getting soaked in the rain

Christmas decorations in the apartment

Hugging a "baby cow"

Cleaning up food pellets at the farm

Unusually snowy weather

"Thugs"

November Zone Conference

Week 49: Zoetermeer in December is vochtig

This week we did not have very many appointments or anything so we had time to set up stuff and find people. So now this next week should be really good. We got a lot of really good potentials and also a few new investigators and even a decent amount of member dinner appointments. So I'm looking forward to a good week. It has gotten really cold here. Everyday I wear long sleeves as well as a sweater and my thickest coat and then a scarf too. It’s hard to explain but it feels way colder than back home, it’s because of the humidity. It’s usually like 0 everyday but it feels like -15 or colder. I wore all thermals for 2 days, haha, crazy. So ya we have been surviving that, then it will rain which makes you really cold and then the wind and there is no sun. Its dreary but I really don’t mind it.

We have found a good system Elder Ballard and I. There are these huge apartment buildings and we wait till someone lets us in, then we knock the doors inside the building. So we stay covered from the rain and there are a lot of people to hit up who all live close together. It works pretty well, we have found a lot of people and no one gets mad that we do that cause it's kinda normal to go inside those buildings and sell things door to door. We found this one guy from Suriname. He is really cool. We knocked his door and he opened and wasn't really havin it then we told him about the BOM and what it is and stuff. We gave him a copy and he said ok wait a second. “Watch!” he said. Then he went inside his house and came back with a 5€ bill and said that if what we say about the book is true and he learns something from it then he will have to give us money for it because he wants to feel free, haha. We told him we couldn’t take it but that it was worth sooooo much money. We set up a return appointment to teach more about the book and gospel. I'm excited for it!

I really like serving in a big ward. There are sign-up sheets and things for the upcoming big ward Christmas dinner party. I’m so glad our ward does stuff like that! I can’t wait to go. Also, next week is stake conference! So that’ll be fun with the hundreds of members.

Funny thing I found AW Rootbeer in one of the stores here! It’s been almost a year since I've had that! Real good stuff. Ya, we are doing Light the World and are working hard with members and investigators to do it. We use it to find new ones too, well trying to. Ya, we share it with everyone and just encourage people and tell them about it. What’s cool is that it’s not even really church related, it’s just being a good person and being a light in someone’s life.

Questions:
1.  What do the Dutch do for Christmas?  What is happening for Sinter Klaas?
2.  Have you received any parcels from me?
3.  Did you travel anywhere this week?
4.  How was church on Sunday?  Do you help out in anyway?
5.  How are your investigators doing?
6.  How is the weather been?
7.  Are you getting many dinners?  Do you cook much and what do you eat?
8.  Can you try to take more pictures of Zoetermeer?
9.  Have you been asked to go to the temple lately?
10.  Did you go to the Farm this week?
11.  Have you seen any Keeshounds or Alaskan Malamutes?

1. Lots, at this point everyone is focused on Sinter Klaas. It is a sin here to talk or prepare for the 25th before Sinter Klaas. So ya because there are 6 missionaries here in Zoetermeer, us and the ward mission leader, Dave, are doing Sinter Klaas with each other. We all drew names and which ever name you get you have to make a present for them then put a present inside with a poem. I’ll explain. So, for example I got Elder Ballard, which is hard cause he is my comp and it’s a secret. Anyway, he likes basketball so I will make him a big bball out of cardboard and stuff, then inside I will put his real present, which I have to get today…  and you are supposed to write a poem that talks about the present as well as Piet and Sint. Should be fun tomorrow. I'll take pics.

2. I haven't no. Zone conference on the 12th, I’m thinkin.

3. Den Haag, but no where else.

4. Good, we are now covering 2 wards, the English and Dutch so we go to the first 2 hours of English then the 3 of Dutch so a lot of church, ahha. But the English members are real cool and I enjoy it. Really weird to have it in English! I also fasted yesterday so it was a long day. I passed the sacrament and gave a prayer in the English ward.

5. No news on J. A., we need to get an appointment with! Other than that we have a lot of potentials we made appointemts with and will hopefully get them to investigator status.

6. Not good, but good.

7. Decent, we make wurst a decent amount as well as pizza and uh Brazilian food and burritos, we eat a lot of cereal and sandwiches too.

8. Ya, I’ll try!

9. Ya, haha, we did, I forgot! We just went this past Wednesday! I got to do baptisms. I was the baptizer which was a first for me! It was really cool cause these 4 members came from Haarlem, with 200 names. Which is a lot! I had to baptize this big tall old guy and I did it 57 times…. my arm was so sore, haha. but it was cool to do in Dutch and also I can pronounce the Dutch names which I thought was really cool. Also, now I can say I baptized on my mission! 57 people, and all in one day! That was really cool though!

10. Always, this time we did the normal scoopin and stuff and feeding the cows and we also added new hay to the young cows and fed milk to the 3 day old calf which was super super cute. He also got a bunch of new cows, like 7, so we had to take care of them as well. It was a good time. Although it was super duper cold. Our hands were cold but there are barns that we could go into to warm up. 40 cows in one barn makes it really warm inside!

11. Not one! I am on the lookout though!

Word of the week is 'vochtig' pronounced foh - ggg - tih - ggg, the g’s are the hard gurgley Dutch g sound. It’s really fun to say and it means 'humid'.

hou doe

elder fernhout

"This is the weather pretty much every day"

Part of the district

Week 48: Uitwisselingen

This was the week of exchanges! We did 2. The first was with the other elders, so I guess it wasn’t really with us because it was the Den Haag elders and the other 2 in the apartment, Elders O en B but it was cool cause we hung out with with Elder Leland that night. He's from Atlanta. He has been out for only 1 transfer so he is pretty green. Then 2 days later, I went on exchanges with him. We exchanged after district meeting then came back and did some work. We also had a dinner appointment that day with a really cool member. He fed us swarma meat, good stuff. On Wednesday we had to stay home the whole day cause someone was coming to fix the heater and they gave us a time gap of 7 hours of when he could probably come.  It worked out well cause the next day we had apartment checks where they check the cleanliness of the apartment, so we used Wednesday to clean up really well. I was in charge of the bathroom which I mopped and made clean. It looked great! We did a good job I must say. The next day, when the senior couple came over they said that it was nice and especially so considereing we are a 4 man.

Thursday Elder Ballard and I had some time and we went to this poorer area of Zoetermeer. We found more success there, the people are more humble and it went well. We gave out 6 BOMs in 4 different languages and found this Russian girl who said we could bring a Russian copy by her sometime. We met her on the street. What's cool is that we have a Russian lady in our ward and we had a dinner appointment with her and her husband a few days ago. We gave her a Russian BOM and asked her to write her testimony in the front of it in Russian! So we will give that to the girl we found. The next day Ballard and I gave out 4 more BOM. Just to put that into perspective, last transfer Ballard and I combined gave out 3 the entire transfer, him in Den Helder and me in Emmen. So we did double that in one day, haha, crazy. We didn't have very many appointments with people so we went around to all our investigators and people and tried to make appointments with them. We called up a bunch of our potentials too and ended up with some good stuff for next week. Also, yesterday at church we got a few dinner appointments for the week.

We went to the farm again which is always good. This time we cleaned out the barn where the 4 baby cows live [or calves, haha]. It was full of straw and hay that was matted together. It was super super heavy and there was so much of it, but it was fun and a good workout.  I have now learned a few hymns on the guitar and EO got his violin from home and he has been teaching me to play that now, haha. It's really really fun, and tbh, pretty easy. Oh and for transfer calls, all of us 4 are staying here, which I think will be really nice for Christmas. I am excited. Elder Rytting is being transferred to Delft which is really close. He is in my district. So it'll be fun to see a friendly and familiar face again. The guy I went on exchanges with, Elder Leland, got transferred to Brugge. I told him he's gonna love it. Emmen is being pink washed, which means it’s being white washed but with sisters, haha.  Zr Wolverton will go there. Elder Nielsen is going to Utrecht. I will most likely see him at the next zone conference!

We had a good lesson with the Turkish family, they are so nice. The husband read almost the whole BOM! The wife had homemade Turkish soup for us when we got there and it was super super delicious. She also gave us a bread and some more homemade Turkish vegetable stuff, so so nice. Then we taught a good lesson and she even gathered her family for it and asked the kids if they wanted to go to our church. So we will hopefully see them one of these days! They have this little daughter who is 3 and she is sooo cute, we played with her for a bit. That reminds me, yesterday was the primary presentations. It was soooo funny, it was a typical primary presentation with loud kids singing rambunctiously and kids being funny. They had the whole chapel laughing, it was great.

Questions:
1.  What is happening with transfers?
2.  Why were you up at 4:00 am last Sunday morning?
3.  Did you teach the Polish lady who is reading the BoM?
4.  Any investigators progressing?  
5.  Do you have many referrals from the “Light the World” campaign?
6.  How do the Dutch celebrate Christmas?
7.  Did you do service at the farm this week?
8.  Does it rain more in the winter?  Is it cold and do you have a warm enough coat?

1. Staying
2. So I was woken up by some loud yelling and door slamming in our building somewhere at like 4:00 am. Then at 4:20 someone rang our doorbell. I looked out our bedroom window which looks onto the area in our front door, no one was there. So I went to the door and no one there either. So I went back to bed. I heard some more yelling in the distance and slamming. It sounded really crazy, tbh. Then at 4:40 someone rang our doorbell again like 3 times really panicky. EO goes to the door and I watch from the window. All I see is this guy talking to Occon, then he comes into our apartment! So I thoguht he was beating Occon or something. Turns out he locked himself out of his apartment and wanted to go through our house to get to his balcony from ours because he is our neighbour. So we let him run through real quick. We were all up at that point and talking about it. Then he knocked on the glass door on our balcony 5 mins later and wanted to walk back though. He told us that his wife is crazy and locked him out. He smelled really bad of alcohol and weed. We let him through once again then decided to leave our apartment so we wouldn’t have to deal with that again but it was 5:00 am and I didn't want to leave so we just stayed. We watched him out the window and he and his wife or girlfriend or whatever were banging on his door with all of their might and they tried to break the door down. They were super super angry and were yelling threats like they were going to kill the person insides mother and dad. It was super bad. They were furious. Then they ran away and slammed another door that went to the stairs and they shattered the glass, crazy. This week we were home and one night he just started cleaning our windows from the outside cause he felt bad, haha. It helped us cause the next day we had apartment checks.
3. We went by yesterday and she wasn’t home, dangit.
4. J still comes to church which is great but we haven't had a lesson with him since...
5. We got one more, haha.
6. I don't actually know. Sinterklaas is pretty big...
7. Yup
8. Rain oh yes. Oooh yes very cold and windy, so cold here. I like it.

Love you lots bye!

Exchanges with Elder Leland