Facetime with Nick

We finally Facetimed with Nick. He gets his own post.

Accustomed

Our previous stage of  Adjustments is progressing to "Accustomed"

Some of the things we're getting used to are:

1 - wearing church clothes everyday

even when we're playing silly FHE games                      and feeding cute young adults

2 - junk piles on the street 

When a tenant moves out of an
apartment, the whole place is gutted.                           Although Sister Matheson and I hauled this
Don't ask me why a country who is                              chair up to her apartment from the junk pile.
meticulous about recycling doesn't have a
Habitat for Humanity or something for
used household furnishings.

3 - shelf toilet

Somehow my nose shuts off when I go into the bathroom so it doesn't bother me anymore. Miracles!

4 - cigarettes galore

Cigarettes are sold in vending machines on the streets. 

But most smokers are respectful and stay outside.

5 +  We're also becoming used to apartment living with neighbor noises, the gray weather (thanks to a light box and upcoming spring), German frankness (last week at our place when a German friend cooked a typical meal for us and another missionary didn't eat much, the German said "I'll never cook for you again."), We're also enjoying a simpler life, not feeling pressure to buy stuff for our home and clothes, more prayers and scripture study, time at the temple, walks, reading, (two great books)

and my overall favorite: Facetime, Photo Stream and Hanging Out!

(Nick's usually between classes so we just talk and don't get him on camera much.)

What kind of a mission is this?

To be honest, this "mission" is more like a job than a typical mission. It has taken me awhile to understand that but I'm learning to appreciate that any contribution we make to helping missionaries do well is worthwhile, even if we're not the ones out teaching and serving others.

There are many others who do this type of work in the area office. There are volunteer attorneys, real estate experts, couples over public affairs, humanitarian projects, family services, young single adults, self-reliance. And that's just in our office. There's a financial office with "missionaries" and of course, a family history center and temple which are partially staffed with missionaries. Here's a picture taken Sunday when Elder Hallstrom spoke to us. Surrounding him and his wife is the Area Presidency - Texeiras, Kearons and Dyches. The rest is our new senior social group. (We're on the far right). 

So here's our office where we go most days.  (That's Frank helping set up our computers). 

Rand's main responsibility is to advise and consult with mission presidents' wives or nurses about the young and old missionaries' health concerns.  He writes no prescriptions and only makes suggestions about treatment, including seeing a doctor. Rand's on call 24 hours a day. In our assigned missions there are about 3000 missionaries serving in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, one mission in Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and France. There's a non-English-speaking nurse in one of the French missions so I get to help Rand with her. He also reviews and passes off the health histories on missionary applications from those countries. There are also meetings to attend, reports to fill-out, notes to make and follow-ups with sick missionaries. 

The main medical issues in order are orthopedics, gastrointestinal, psychiatric (there are three mental health advisors), trauma/accidents, neurological, infectious disease, dermatology, and ear/nose/throat It's gratifying because he explains things well and is a great resource for making decisions. He is enjoying the relationships he's developing with mission presidents and their wives. They are remarkable and show their love of the Lord through this huge service. The challenges of the job are not being able to get the health information other than by second hand reports, trying to understand what's going on long-distance, and not being able to make decisions about treatment. He is an advisor and not a care-giver or decision-maker.

I'm Rand's "lovely assistant". This is what several of us wives whose husbands have a job and we come along for the ride call ourselves. This picture shows some of us doing a project - Debbie Riggs and Marsha Castleton's husbands are in the Office of General Counsel, Sharon Greenwood and I are the doctors' wives. Marsha is also the Frankfurt mission's nurse so we helped her make packets for the missionaries one day in our office.

I finally found a job last week helping track service missionaries in the Europe area. These are young and older church members who want to volunteer for the church but aren't serving missions. It's a computer job but fun to work with Silvia from Italy, Olinda from Portugal and Coraline from France.

Which reminds me of our international ward. There are members from 42 countries and we come together on Sunday mornings to worship the Savior. We always have visitors; in fact Sunday a Ryser family from Switzerland showed up!

So that's why most of our posts are about eating or trips. What we do during the week isn't that picturesque.

Blackmer Adoption

The event of a lifetime occurred last week and we were home for it!

Bella's picture says it all.  I love them!

Made this video for them. 

Sorry it's long but I've saved up not posting pictures of the girls for over a year.

Blackmer video

Butlers in Holland

Holladay friends, Ann and Ron Butler left on their mission a week before we did so we thought it was high time we visited them in the Low Country of the Netherlands. We had a great time laughing, eating, and hanging out with Butlers in  Eindhoven

"Stop Ron!"

Indonesian/Chinese Rice Table

and at the temple in The Hague. It was fun to hear Ann speak Dutch, the language of her childhood.

We were more than a little jealous of their apartment, right on a lake, clever architecture next door.  But it is freezing there!

Holidays

Our Christmas tree

The sister missionaries came for Christmas dinner. Nothing fancy but they were mostly here so they could Skype/Hangout with their families on our laptops - very fun! Looks like two dinner guests is our limit.

Snow and a day of sunshine!

Missionaries having a snowball fight on pday

Keeping with tradition, we went to a movie at the Wiesbaden military base with Sharon Greenwood. Do you remember when movie theaters were this big?  They even started with everyone standing for the Star Bangled Banner. Yea America!

 The girls sent this of their unplanned matching scarves.  Love them!

 Dave continued his masterful White Elephant art of Nick, "Whistler's Father."

Elise, Ted and Julian in McCall.  Always prepared in case Julian gets hungry. :)

A bad odor in our bathroom (it wasn't just from the shelf toilet) evolved into a full-blown leak from upstairs. Since Germany shuts down for two weeks, we don't expect resolution for awhile. Makes for really cold bathroom stops since we're keeping the window open most of the time.

Some of the elders joined a lot of us senior missionaries for New Year's Eve. Aren't they a wonderful-looking group? 

Crazy fireworks in the streets. We had a great view from the Bangerters' 10th floor balcony.

Happy 2015!

Freiberg

Went on a three-day outing to Freiberg, thanks to our well-traveled friends, Brenda and Ron Jacques. They knew President and Sister Kosack in Latvia on their first mission. The Kosacks are mission presidents in the Berlin mission and invited Jacques and a few other Frankfurt seniors to join their Berlin senior missionary retreat. What a treat!

 We loved the Freiberg temple and city,

Here's where we stayed, where temple patrons bunk when they come from far away (4 hours for us)

President and Sister Kosack gave us a very inspirational peptalk about being senior missionaries. I like this quote:

They also shared their experience of growing up in Eastern Germany - fascinating. Were they joking when they said that the Polish translation of "Come Come Ye Saints" says "Not so bad" instead of "All is well"? Sometimes that's all one can say and be honest.

On the way back to Frankfurt, we visited the open air museum at Moedlareuth, also called Little Berlin. It's a small village that was divided by the Iron Curtain in 1952. The town has kept portions of the wall and other paraphernalia (trucks, tanks, etc) for a very visual representation of life in East and West Germany. Rand was a great tour guide with his knowledge of history and German.

More about Moedlareuth