Decorating for Christmas!

Tonight for family night, we decorated the Institute for Christmas.  The kids really got into it, putting lights up every where.  First, we had to put the tree together.  Walters, (an investigator) started that task while we pulled out the rest of the decorations.  Putting the lights on the tree proved a challenge.  Apparently, Walters had never put lights on a tree, and his helper, Elder Hadfield had only put lights up once.  It proved to be a comical and slow process until Sebastian stepped up and helped them.  I think all the decorations were used to decorate.  We have things hanging on walls, from ceilings, and around windows, doors, and walls.  It looks great!  Merry Christmas everyone!

Thanksgiving 2012

It is Thanksgiving week.  We have shopped and now are ready to start cooking.  I made cranberry sauce using a mix of fresh and dried berries with sugar and oranges.  Mmmm, tasty.  Wednesday was pie making day.  I invited any of the Young adults that wanted to make pies to come.  Ronny, Vanessa, and Yvonne came to help.  Sisters Larson and Child also came to help.  We made 11 pumpkin pies.  The girls mixed and rolled pie crust, mixed pumpkin filling and baked pies.  They smelled wonderful.  After the clean up was done, we decided to fold the napkins for each place setting.  Ronny went on line and found a bunch of folded napkins.  We picked one that didn't look too hard, and proceeded to fold 80 napkins.  They looked like little swans or crowns, I can't decide which.  Dan had sat up all the tables, so we added the dishes and napkins and then went home.  It made it a lot more fun with the young adults there to help.

Thanksgiving Day!  Lots to do to get dinner ready  for 75 people.  First, the dressing.  I mixed it together and then put it in the crock pot to cook.   I had never cooked it in the crock pot before but had instructions and went for it.   Next, the green bean casserole.  You can't buy cream of mushroom soup in Germany, so I had to make my own before making the sauce for the green beans.  The next project was the homemade rolls.  I made 90+ rolls.  I will warm them before we eat.  Now it is time to go take a little rest before cooking the turkey.  Turkeys in Germany are small and ovens are small.  It was a better use of space and time to cook turkey breasts.  I seasoned them them same way I always do and put them in cooking bags to pop in the oven at 5pm.  After the turkeys were in the oven,  I got the potatoes ready to go.  I used potato flakes, I just didn't have the time or inclination to peel and mash potatoes for 75 people.   When the turkeys were done, drained off the liquid and made a gallon of gravy.  They have this gravy thickener her that is wonderful.  It doesn't lump!  I will have to go to the German market to buy this when I get home.  The beans are hot, the rolls are hot, the turkey is sliced up, it is time to eat.

We had an assembly line to serve the dinner.  Several of the young adults helped serve making the line go faster.  It seemed that it would never end.  I was beginning to get worried that the food would run out, but we had just enough.  Everyone was full!  It was nice to serve a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, just a lot o work.

Now, my least favorite part, Clean up.  Most of the kids helped do dishes, take down tables and put chairs away.  We were all done by 1030pm.  Elder Johnson and I went home tired but happy to have spent a nice Thanksgiving with our new friends in Germany.

A Great Weekend

This weekend was quit eventful.  Friday night, we had a baptism in Tiergarten Gemeinde.  Ronny, (Yan Hong), was baptized.  She is a lovely young adult from China.  She is studying here in Germany.  She is what you would call a Golden contact.  She came to Stake Conference and wanted to know more about the church.  She continued to ask questions, and meet with the missionaries, attend Institute and FHE, study, read, and pray.  She went to the Temple with the YSA's last week to pray about baptism.  She asked Dan to baptize her.  He was honored to do so.  She is his first baptism here in Germany.  I was asked to give the only talk at the baptism.  I also played the piano.  The spirit was so strong.  Ronny was just beaming.  She worries that she isn't good enough.  I have had to explain to her that everyone makes mistakes, but if she repents and tries again, the Lord will bless her.  We are so blessed to have Ronny in our lives.

Saturday morning we had transfer calls.  This can be a stressful hour for our missionaries.  They find out if they will be transferred to another area or stay where they are, or get a new companion.  This transfer call, 3 of our missionaries are going home, their 2 years or 18 months are finished.  We also had 2 more missionaries get transferred to another location.  We will get 5  new missionaries in our district.  We will miss those going home, and being transferred.  We look forward to meeting and getting to know the new members of our district.  We completed transfer calls with one last breakfast together. 

After our transfer calls and breakfast, Dan and I headed off to Metro to do some shopping for Thanksgiving.  It was cold, about 2* C.  We bundled up, grabbed our pull carts and off we went.  We seem to have this trip down to a science;  bus ride to Zoo, train to Ostbahnhof, walk 3/4 kilometer to Metro, shop and return home.  It takes about 3 hours to complete all of this on a good day.  I thought you would like to see our pull carts for shopping.  On are arrival back at the church to put things away, We met Walter standing at the gate.  He wanted to know when church was and if he could come.  We arranged to meet him in the morning at church.  I hope he comes.

 Saturday night we met the Elders and Sisters for one last dinner together at Delores California Burrito and back to our house for dessert and a spiritual thought and prayer.  We eat together every Friday night.  Our little "Family" is breaking up, going different directions.  Happy times and sad times for everyone. 

Walter came to church, stayed for the whole 3 hour block, and made an appointment to meet with the Elders tomorrow night to learn more about the church.  I hope he comes. 

Reflections from Deb

Can you believe it?  We have been in Germany for a year.  In some ways, it seems like yesterday and in others, it seems like we have been here forever.  When we arrived, the weather was cold, as it is now.   The trees were bare of leaves and it stated getting dark about 4 pm.  That is how it is now except the trees are not quite bare.  There are still yellow leaves to fall off.  As I think of the past year, I see things a little differently.  Riding the trains and buses are not as frightening now.  If we get kicked off a train, we just sigh and try to figure out where we are and find another way to our desired destination.  A year ago when this happened, I would panic, especially if it was dark.  I did not like being lost in Berlin, unable to speak the language, and not having a clue as to what I needed to do next.  More then once, I wanted to come home where I knew my way around , had a car, and was not cold and wet.  I've grown.  Now I just shrug my shoulders, get impatient with the transit system here and move on.  I still don't like Deutsche Post, but that is a whole other story.

One of our first trips here in Germany with the YSA's was to the Freiburg Temple.  I remember feeling awed by the fact that I was in East Germany at the Freiburg Temple looking up at the Angel Moroni.  Yesterday, when we went to the Freiburg Temple with the YSA's, I still had that feeling of awe.  I was in a place that I never dreamed of going to in my life time, and I have been there 3 times.

We have made many friends here in Germany, both with the YSA's and the members of our Gemeinde Tiergarten.  I will be sad to leave these wonderful people yet happy to see missed friends and family.  I have not learned to speak the language, but I do understand a lot if the people speak slow.  There are too many people here that speak English.  The people here get frustrated with our slow German and after a few sentences they switch to English so we can have a intelligent conversation.  Dan is doing much better then I with speaking German, but he studies more then I. 

Our Mission is not exactly what I expected.  We do so much cooking.  Sometimes I feel that is all we do, but then there are those times when spirit whispers to me that what we do is important and needed.  It provides a  place for the YSA's to meet together and share fun and ideas.  It is rewarding when the young people come and ask for advice or just need to talk and have someone listen.  And the HUGS are the best.  Everyone here comes into the kitchen and give us a big hug and hangs out while we are cooking.   It is great to see the spiritual growth that take place.  So when I get tired and discouraged, I just think back to those times in the kitchen when someone needed me to give a hug or just listen about their bad day, or bounce ideas they have off me.  It is then that I know that we are in the right place at the right time. 

As I look forward to the next 6 months, I am afraid it will go too fast and too slow.   I love being here and I want to come home.  I am not looking forward to another winter, yet when spring comes, this 18 month mission will be over and we will have only memories of these wonderful people that we serve and have grown to love left.   Thanks to a loving Heavenly Father, I know we will meet again in the next life and be able "catch up" on each other's lives. 

The pictures are of us at the Freiburg Temple yesterday.  The only thing that has changed from last year is the date.  Everything else is the same.  Oh , and we know what "Templekleiderverkauf" means.

Sachsenhausen Gedenkstatte

Monday, we went to the Sachsenhausen Memorial.  Just north of Berlin, Sachsenhausen was one of   the most notorious death camps of the Nazi empire and was liberated by Allied troops in 1945.  The freedom was short-lived.  the soviet secret police turned it into a prison camp, and the misery and death continued for 5 more years. 

The largest prison camp in East Germany, Sachsenhausen was home to some 12,000 inmates from 1945-1950, when the prison was shut down.  Mass graves of former prisoners were discovered here in 1990.  During WWII, Sachsenhausen was the administrative headquarters for all the concentration camps.  The SS learned its methods of mass killing at this camp.  Most of the 30,000 victims of the Nazi regime were prisoners of war. 

As we walked around the camp looking at the rebuilt buildings, seeing the devices of torture, and killing alley, I just could not understand how one human being could treat another so inhumanly.  All I could think of was that Satan was having a good day here as he witnessed the human suffering and degradation.  

Many German people say that the German's did not know what was going on in the death camps.  I find that hard to believe.  The many camps are located in and about the city.  How could the people not know what was going on?  My thought on this is that they were so afraid that it could happen to them if they said anything, that they turned a "blind eye" to what was going on. 

President Monson in Berlin and the Festival of Lights

Sunday was a great day!  First, we were privileged to have President Monson in Berlin to speak to us.  Getting to the stadium was an ordeal though.  We waited at the bus stop for 20 minutes and then they blocked off the road for a marathon that was going through the area.  The Bauman's were with us from Gorlitz, so the 4  of us walked to the bus stop at Zoological Garten and found the buses not running there either.  Our next option was the train.  I knew what the stop was called by the ICC stadium, so we looked for the stop and them figured out what trains to take to get there.  fortunately it wasn't hard.  while waiting for the train, a young man came up to us and said he had been reading the Bible for the last 4 years and had questions about God.  He wanted to know if we could answer his questions.  A few were answered, but we quickly realized he needed more time then we had.  We invited him to come with us to hear the Prophet speak, but he was unable to come.  He gave us his name and address, and phone number and agreed to have the missionaries call.  The missionaries called him late in the afternoon and made an appointment with him to talk.  I know the Lord led us to that particular train station instead of us finding another bus to take. ( Unfortunately, Ibraham got on the internet and read some negative things about Mormon's and canceled his appointment saying he wasn't interested learning about our church.)

On Sunday evening, the 4 of us set out to see the Festival of Lights.  An artist here in Berlin, Phillip Geist, uses diverse architectures in moving, painterly light sculptures which challenges the onlookers' perception of two-and three-dimensionality.  I hope you can see from the pictures a little of the beauty and complexity of his art work.  We thought it was amazing.  The first 5 pictures are of the same building, The Berlin Dome Church.  It took about 10 minutes to watch the whole light show on the church.  It was amazing.  The other pictures were taken at Potdamer Platz. 

Service is Fun!

Saturday, we went with the Missionaries from our zone to Eisenhuttenstadt for a service project. Della, one of our YSA's,  grandmother needed help in her yard to get it ready for winter.  Della's grandmother is not a member of the church and mostly does not like Mormons, but she likes the missionaries.  We arrived about 930 after a 1 1/2 hour  train ride.  We were served breakfast of hot tea (herbal) and little sandwiches.  We then were given assignments.  Dan and I had to convince her that we liked gardening, she thought we should just watch.  I was given the assignment to rake all the walk ways, over 100 yards of them and gather up the leaves and take them to the compost area.  Dan and the Elders cut down tree limbs, moved rocks, pulled some weeds, and trimmed some bushes.  The Sisters were assigned to dig out a couple of plants and trim the bushes in another part of the garden.  Her garden was big!  It was about 5x as big as our backyard at home.  Dani, you would have loved it.  There was a pond, grass areas, plus lots of individual garden areas filled with trees and plants.  The weather was perfect for gardening.  It was cool, but sunny.  It was great working outside in the garden again.  It is funny the things you miss.  We worked for about 4-5 hours and then it was time for lunch.  Della's grandmother is from Poland so she fixed us a polish meal of wurst and white cabbage.  Surprisingly, the cabbage was quite good.  It had cabbage, peaches, ginger root, onions, and some bits of meat in a sweet and sour sauce.  We also had apples and pears from off her trees which were mighty tasty.  She then served a piece of apple cake made from apples off her trees. We were full after eating.  "Ich bin zot!"  We then took the long train ride home, tired but happy.  Della told me that her grandmother's heart was softening towards the church because of service by the Branch members and the missionaries.   That is a good thing since Della will be going on a mission after the first of the year.