Week Twelve

FAMILY-

Hi. So I'm sitting here in Hannover, on Monday (Nobody is on the streets or anything because the Friday before Easter, Easter, and the Monday after are all holidays) in this InternetLaden, Emailing you! Pretty cool? I think so. The weather right now is pretty ugly. It's super cloudy, pretty cold, and raining. I think it's supposed to be like this all week.

This last week was pretty cool and uplifting. It was a definite answer to a lot of prayers. Lately, our whole district has been slowing down a lot. At one point we had no progressing investigators, and none of our other investigators looked promising. But now we're doing a lot better! We have one brother, who is from Ghana. He speaks English and he's super cool and excited about the gospel. We made out a baptismal date with him for May 10th. We also met another man from Iran. I'll tell you about him in my weekly breakdown.

Monday was P-Day-we got to watch the last session of conference at the Eheparr's (Missionary couple) place on their laptop. So I got to watch all of conference! Which was nice and I'll tell you about it later. After that, we got a Döner, did our regular P-Day stuff, then went to work! It was slow though and I think all we got was one new appointment.

Tuesday was pretty slow too. We traveled pretty far to try and meet with a member who just moved here/meet with an investigator (they live in the same neighborhood), but they were both gone so it was a waste of time really. We ate lunch...Maggiepacks. Maggie packs are a life saver. It's basically like a packet of spices and it tells you what you need for a whole meal and you just buy what it says and follow the instructions. It's pretty easy and usually good. We eat SO much for lunch. It's the biggest meal of the day here. Kind of like what Christian experienced in Mexico if I'm correct. We just stuff ourselves and sit back...try not to fall asleep. Germans go all out when they feed us. So much food. Surprisingly though, I've lost a little weight. Like 5 pounds nothing huge. After lunch we went to meet with an investigator, but he wasn't there. So we just made out appointments. We then taught an ewig (ewig meaning eternal). She's been taking the lessons for like 18 months or something and her investigator sheet is huge. She reads and studies the BOM and Bible like every day, goes to institute, lives the commandments, and has a good friend in the church. We can't figure out why she won't be baptized, so that's really what we need to work on. She's really shy, but she's nice. Ewigs are hard, because they don't really improve or make progress. They just are stuck on being baptized. We'll figure it out though.

We started out Wednesday with our study, like usual. We tried doing finding after, and it was my turn to chose where we were going to find. I choose a place, but we got nothing. Shut down everywhere we looked. It's not a good feeling at all. Our day was pretty slow after that. Went by on a couple of appointments, but nothing really spectacular or amazing. We were able to play volleyball with the JAE's (young single adults) after. It was fun.

 Knocking on doors...

Thursday morning we had district meeting. After that I went on tausch (or splits) with Elder Welker, and we went to Nienburg. Nienburg is a really small town probably 30 minutes North of Hannover by train. The tausch was nice. We didn't get a lot done there though. Nienburg is super small. The ward is like 25 people and the city is like 500. Or something I'm not entirely sure. It was a good experience though, and it was nice to get my first tausch done. I helped make out an appointment for them, which was good.

On Friday, I returned to Hannover after morning study. We then went to a local member family that are super nice! They're an older couple, and they just LOVE the missionaries and love feeding us. I ate at their place a couple weeks ago right when I got here, but was so Jet-Lagged that I had no appetite. Apparently that disapointed them. So this time I came prepared. I ate like 6 pieces of meat (assorted chicken/pork/wursts) and like 5 baked potatoes. SO MUCH FOOD. I just wanted to show that I really like their cooking (because it's delicious) and appreciate that they feed us and love us so much. I think I made a good impression. After that Elder Carlson destroyed his ankle on the way home. (Elder Carlson is one of the zone leaders that live in the apartment with us). It was so bad and swollen and bruised. We escorted him home to ice it. I think it's a little better now. We then met with the older lady from Spain. She speaks Spang-lish-deutsch. It's interesting, but she is nice. She was baptized around 3 years ago, but is having problems, so we meet with her. After that, we met with another Neubekehrt (recent convert). She's cool and I like meeting with her, but she speaks German SO FAST. It's kind of ridiculous. The appointment went well, but on our way home we were late for a Bahn, so we had to run after it. I'm stupid fast so it wasn't a problem getting there, but I got a HUGE blister on the bottom of my foot that's been giving me problems. It'll heal though.

Saturday morning we watched Elder Thorley (my comp) and Elder Locher (the other zone leader, aus der Schweiß) play soccer with the JAEs. Elder Carlson and I watched because of our foot problems. We got Bäckery though, which is so so so good. After that we had lunch. I attempted to make Leek/Ground beef/cheese soup from a Maggipack. It turned out pretty good. It tasted good, but it had this weird grey color to is. We ended up calling it "Russkie Goulash". It's a favorite. After that we had weekly planning and study. After that, we meet with the coolest guy ever. We though he wasn't going to show up, but he did. He took us to this cafe in a department store in Innenstadt. We drank delicious hot chocolate and talked. He's from Iran and used to be Muslim, but found too many faults with the religion, so he left. (By the way, Muslims are the most inconsistent religious group of people I've ever met. You can meet one and talk about how everyone worships the same God and how they respect missionaries and it'll be really cool, and then right after talk to one who says the exact opposite and yells at you. Weird).  This brother has a crazy story involving his ex-wife. She basically left him and tried to sue him and was real nasty to him, but he still loves her and it's really sad. He's a great guy though and was really excited to meet and wanted to meet again soon. I see potential in him.

On Sunday, we went to church not having an eating appointment set, but that changed right when we walked in the doors. The ward is good to us, and we probably got like 15 offers to eat. We ate some questionable meet (I think boiled pork), Rotkohl (red cabbage) and boiled potatoes with gravy. It was a pretty good meal. Straight up German. We stayed there way too long though, which cut into our finding time. Luckily enough, our prayers were answered and we made out an appointment!

That was my week!

Now to answer your questions:

I'm not entirely sure when I get to call you on Mother's day or how it works, but I'll let you know asap. I'm sorry that I haven't sent any photos home yet...we're super busy every day so we never have time to print them out, and the only other option is sending the SD card home, but it's a huge card and not full at all. I'm not sure if I can upload them onto an email from this crazy Turkish internetladen either. If you sent me like a 2G memory card, I could copy photos onto it from my big one and mail that home. I feel like that would work. Elder Thorley is a really great guy and good missionary. He's funny and we joke around a lot, but we always get a lot of good work done. He's leaving after the next transfer, so that means I'm killing him. I'll be the last companion he has in the mission field. It'll be sad. But he has around 7 more weeks with me. My German is coming. I understand almost everything that is said, but I have trouble speaking. We're working on it though. I can talk to people on the streets pretty well now though!

I enjoyed conference. I really like how they stressed forgiveness. I feel like that's a problem that I've faced for a while, just letting things go and not holding grudges, but I'm trying to fix that. They mentioned something that was really good for investigators. They talked about being converted to the church and the gospel and how you have to be converted and understand both. I like that. I also like that they talked a lot about love and I think it helped me understand a little better why we do missionary work. I enjoyed conference and took a lot of it to heart. I hope you guys did too!

Well that's it! There's not much else to say. I'm still doing good! Keeping busy and tired haha.

I love and miss you all! A lot.

P.S. If you can get a webcam hooked up to the computer, I can skype you on Mothers Day!

Love,

Elder Pollard