Week 41

3 January 2011
Subject: Narnia is lovely this time of year. All that snow.

Hello dear family,

I got the packet from Grandma Win this week. Thanks Grandma and Grandpa! This was a good week. It was relatively warm--between -10 and -4 all week! Nothing much else exciting in weather news. We were driving to Örnsköldsvik on Thursday for District Meeting and the entire scene was shades of gray, blue, and white. It was beautiful. The sky was a light blue and fairly matched the landscape.

We've found a few more people to teach this week. One man comes from Greece, another from Colombia originally, and another from Sierra Leone. We also contacted a lady who was interested from somewhere else in Africa. We were very blessed. Hopefully our appointments will go through with them.

The stories this week are all sad it seems. New converts who are still without a home. I think I mentioned before about the one guy who was sleeping in the train station, but since has been moving from hotel to hotel, living off their charity while he waits for a job. The other recent convert whose apartment burned should be getting a place for the next couple of months, so that's happy. There's a less active whose kids we are teaching who is married to a lady in Colombia. He hasn't been able to get ahold of her for over 2 months. The last time he talked to her, she said there was no money for food and she'd have to sell her phone. He said I don't know if I have a wife left :( We finally met with a 14 year old girl who has started imitating her father's own apathy towards church right now. That seems to be so common. People are sorry after they come back and their grown children have no faith. I also met this girl who is a champion belly dancer of her age group back in Azerbaijan (sp?). She was really nice and I hear she was really positive about learning about the church, but we can't teach her because her dad doesn't like us. He's nice when we are just visiting, though. They got a negative on their application for residency and might have to move back soon. They made us 'juice' out of coke syrup. Flat coke. Yum!

New Year's Eve was really fun. We went home and did weekly planning. There had been fireworks going off sporadically throughout the evening, but about 9 they started going off all over town. We have a view of the city, so we could see a good number of them. The coolest thing we saw was these little bags with some kind of ignited something or other that would rise up somewhere in the city and float away to better places. We have no idea what they were still, some kind of mini hot air balloon contraption. We asked someone at church and they said they thought it was a Finnish tradition. We forgot to ask the Finns in the ward...so maybe I'll let you know next week.

Last night I was calling some former investigators and called one guy who said he was going to be getting married in Cuba this spring (which is why he can't meet with us now...go figure) and I asked him if he can speak Spanish. He said yes and I told him I could too. I was done and going to hang up, but he asked me about why I could speak Spanish, so we chatted for awhile in Spanish. It was fun. Maybe he'll remember that the next time the missionaries call him :)

This week I was told for the third time that I look like Princess Viktoria, the crown princess of Sweden, and the one who just got married, so I am accepting it as true. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but the first two times were both at Stake Conference. Elder Herrey, father of the famous Herreys, told me I looked like her and then later the assistants told me they had decided that I looked like her the night before. I was quite flattered. I'll have to buy one of her books.

Anyway, the work is picking up. The last month has felt like we were driving in thick snow (figuratively), so it's nice that the new year is finally here. I can't think of anything else. I love being a missionary and I'm grateful for the chance to be here. I love you all. Good luck going back to work and school. That's always the worst, but it'll be fine once you get your head wet.

Syster Maxwell