Dan Haag - Week 26

Den Haag - Week 26

This week has been amazing. I am already in love with Den Haag and I love it here. It's a big city right by the ocean, so it's super super windy (like blowing bikes over windy) and also the bike paths are busier so you need to pay more attention to what you're doing. There are also tons of trams everywhere and traffic and it's great. 

We've already had several amazing lessons the past couple of days. I am so grateful for the actual work we have here. I love our investigators.  One of them straight up asked us if she could be baptized, which was amazing. The spirit has been so strong in our lessons and it has been really cool working with joint teaches. This has been my first time having a member present. My companion is also awesome. She is from Maryland and she is amazing. I love her! We have tons of fun. Den Haag is the first non-english speaking ward in the world, so they're pretty proud of that. There are six other missionaries here too, which is super fun. I love our district, they are all amazing. 

It's been a really great week!

Breda - Week 25

Breda - Week 25
This past Tuesday I hit my 5 months in the mission mark! WOOHOO! Zuster Mangum is from my MTC group too so we both went an celebrated with a fancy pancake. She got a pumkpin chocolate cupcake and I got a banana chocolate cupcake. Het was echt lekker. We were supposed to have a lesson that day but when we showed up to Maria´s house, she wasn´t home, so we were pretty disappointed. We were going to leave the area but then I figured last second that we might as well knock on our less active´s house. We have been leaving her cookies and trying our best to meet with her but she´s never home and always cancels our appointments. But this time when we knocked on her door, she was actually home and made an appointment with us for the next day, and when we showed up the next day she was actually home and hadn´t cancelled. We were so happy! Small miracles are real! 

On Thursday we went and helped Zuster Parker and Neale with their portion of Breda and then during a break went and found Vincent Van Gogh´s grandfather´s grave. Vincent Van Gogh grew up in Breda and his grandfather was actually a preacher at the Grote Kerk. There were lots of old and gigantic graves. 

On Friday we had a dinner appointment! YAY! 

Sunday was an amazing day. I understood nearly everything in church, there were some amazing testimonies from some people in our ward (including a guy who is self investigating the church), and then afterwards we had ward correlation at Rocky´s house and his family made us all hamburgers. It was amazing. After that Zuster Mangum and I went to Linda´s house and made some more Christmas things with her. Linda and her husband made us dinner and we gave them a geestelijke toentje (spirtual treat) about finding miracles in our lives through looking everyday for the miracles that happen to us and writing them down. They were really excited, even her nonmember husband. He shared a story with us about how he had been in the hospital because of Leukemia for a really long time and he had done that with Linda and that had helped him through it a lot, and he found it interesting how we can easily forget to do that when life isn´t as hard and we aren´t praying as desperately for help. That was really awesome to see them both get really excited about it. And then later we saw a shooting star! A really big one. Small miracles. :D 

Today for P-Day we went to this really big World War II museum in Overloon, which I thought was super interesting cool. :D It was amazing.

 

This week is going to pretty exciting. This Saturday we get transfer calls... I´m terrified!! I can´t believe a whole entire transfer has already flown by. I feel like I literally just began this transfer. Also, in one year this will technically be my last transfer. So I technically have about one year from now left! 

It might also snow this week. Thank goodness I got a free giant waterproof jacket from the Murtons. I don´t really want it to snow... it has been SO cold lately. 

We are also going to temple this Wednesday. I´m pretty excited. Joyce from Dordrecht ward is also getting baptized this next Saturday! I am so excited and so Zuster Parker and I are going to go to her baptism. Elder Isaksen also told us that Christina is praying for a baptismal date too, which I makes me SOOO HAPPY. I will travel literally from Groningen to go to her baptism. I love Christina so much! 

Breda - Week 24

Breda - Week 24

Breda - Week 23

Breda - Week 23

Wat heeft deze week gebeurd? Well, firstly we found a lady (while doing bellups) who actually knew who we were and wanted us to come back, so on Tuesday we returned to her house for an appointment. It ended up being a 3 and a half hours long... Mevrouw Smith is a lonely old lady who mostly wanted some company, and though we tried to bring up the gospel and how she got her Boek Van Mormon, she would keep steering the conversation elsewhere. It was pretty funny and it also kept us out of the pouring rain. During that day, Mangum and I also tried some centrum contacting. We´re both terrible at it so we challenged each other to contact one person, and after we did that we could get some fresh harring at the market in the centrum. Zuster Mangum hasn´t had fresh harring yet so that was an adventure. 

Thusrday was a day of little miracles. We had interviews that day and also we gave away both of our Book Van Mormon´s within two hours and had scheduled an appointment! This rarely happens, so we were both eccstatic. Mangum did a glorious heel click out of happiness that I recorded. 

Our highlight of the week though was definitely on Saturday. There is this thick bush/hedge (when I say thick, I mean really thick, you can´t stick you´re hand through it) that comes up to about shin-high and is pretty wide, and these five kittens live inside of it. They are feral and super young and whenever we go knock over there I always try to feed them a little cat treat but they´re super scared and will only come to the edge. Anyways, we knocked for like an hour and then returned only to see this other guy trying to do the same thing. I decided to be brave and go and try to talk to him, and he and his girlfriend loves rescuing animals, so they wanted to help these kittens. You can tell that the kittens were starving. So we tried to help them get the kittens while talking with them and getting to know them, and it was pretty hilarious. I didn´t think their method of trying to get the kittens was at all effective. They ended up getting their neighbor the bring giant sticks to whack the bushes and herd the five kittens to the middle of the bush (the middle was not a good idea but I was like whatever). And then the guy and girl were like trying to walk through the hedge, which involves basically destroying it, so there are holes in that hedge now. It was the funniest image. Two missionaries in skirts with three random people whacking a hedge trying to catch kittens. We ended up leaving eventually but hopefully they caught the kittens, and now if we ever see those people, we have a pretty good conversation starter. 

We also had an appointment with Zuster Staf that evening. Zuster Staf is this adorable old lady who lives in a resting home who is less active because she can´t leave, so we go and share a spiritual thought and sing hyms for her and she loves us. We call her Oma Staf and it makes her cry. When we started to leave she started crying and it was so sad. :( Next week is her birthday so I am going to make her a card with Mice on it, since she loves mice. 

Those were some of the highlights from my week! Oh yeah, we´re also doing this challenge for the whole mission to read the entire Book of Mormon from Oct 13 to the end of the year, while highlighting the names of Christ and any reference to Him, and it has been a really uplifting experience. I have loved doing the challenge. 

I love you all!!! 

Breda - Week 22

Breda - Week 22

This was an absolutely hectic week, haha. On Tuesday, Jasmine asked Mangum and I to come over while she opened her mini-mission call. She was called to Antwerpen and she is so excited. She´s going to be there for four days sometime next week. I am so excited for her!

Jasmine receiving her mini mission call

On Wednesday, we were tracting and we found a windmill with a cute little animal farm next to it. There aren´t a ton of windmills in Breda area so that was pretty fun to see. We debated what would happen if we grabbed onto one of the sails... they looked really strong. We also found some super gorgeous houses and knocked on all of them. One of them is probably going to be my future house. 

Pictures of my future house! :)

On Thursday we went to Eindhoven for Zone Training, which I was super excited for because Eindhoven was the first Holland city liberated by the 101st Aireborne. There´s even a memorial behind the church for them, which I was extremely excited for and took a picture with before Zone Training.

Zone Training was inspiring as usual. It always helps me refocus and get reinspired. There is a super awesome old guy named Harry who is in his 80s who goes out tracting with the missionaries all the time and who comes to every single zone training and conference and district meeting. He does so much with the missionaries that the mission made him a legit missionary badge. He knows everyone's name in our zone and where we are serving. He is amazing and everybody loves him and it´s so fun to see him at Zone Training. After Zone Training, Zuster Mangum and I went to Tilburg for exchanges, which was pretty fun, but added to the hecticness of the week. We were really tired. 

On Sunday we had Stake Conference but it was all the way down in Brussels... Which is really far away and really difficult to get to because it´s in a different country. We have NS-Business cards for transportation in the Netherlands but for Belgium it´s a whole different story. They have a totally different train system (which is a lot more difficult) so we had to a drop a lot of money in order to get down there. And it also took an hour and a half for Elder Soso to make our travel plans.

In order to get down to Brussels by 10:00am, we had to leave an entire day earlier and sleepover. I chose Gent because my old MTC companion is down there, and it was SO FUN to see Zuster Leman again. I was so happy. We left Breda at 4:50 pm and got to the Gent apartment at 8:30 pm, and then we had to leave by 6:50 the following morning and walk kind of far in the dark. It was pretty exhausting but an awesome adventure. It was fun to go to Belgium again. Stake Conference was good, I can understand a lot of what´s being said for the most part but the trick is focusing and wanting to pay attention haha. It was also really cool to hear the Belgian accent, which is called Vlaams. It sounds really French and it is soooo pretty.

It was a pretty hectic week! ​

Breda - Week 21

Breda - Week 21

So this week has been pretty uneventful missionary wise, there was lots of door knocking every day. On Tuesday I went on exchanges to Tilburg with Walqhist, who is in the transfer before me so I was technically oldest! It was fun, we managed to make an appointment and we had a dinner appointment with Hans Boom, who is in the Area of the Seventy. 

On Friday we had a crazy dinner appointment. One of the ladies in our ward is really old and can't take us out to dinner so she has her daughter take the missionaries out every transfer to this really nice buffet where you eat for two hours straight. We had to work through our lunch hour in order to go but it was worth it. We had tons of sushi and little pancakes and all of these exciting foods. Also, Marine is AMAZING, she is so funny and she is obsessed with America, her phone is decorated with the American flag and her ringtone is literally the National Anthem. 

General Conference was really amazing and felt very personal to me. I got a lot out of it and I don't think I've ever loved Conference more than now on my mission. It feels very different. When they say "everyone from all over the world is watching", I realize that I am one of those people far away from America! Ah America! I miss you! But it's okay, I love the Netherlands too. 

On Sunday we knocked for four hours in the pouring down rain and we were FREEZING. Although this week we  did get to climb up the Grote Kerk during a lunch hour, which was super amazing and beautiful. 

Oh yeah, we got transfer calls! Zuster Abbott is going to Groningen, Zuster Parker is going to be training a new greenie (for her third time in a row!!) in Breda still and then Zuster Mangum and I will be companions staying in Breda. So that is awesome!!! Mangum was in the MTC with me and I love her. And I love Zuster Parker so I am super happy that I get to see her everyday! 

Breda - Week 14

Nothing crazy exciting happened this week. A lot of knocking doos and we met some funny people, including a polish guy who told us in broken english that we needed to choose our own way of life, that Zuster Parker´s shoes were too old, and that we needed to not follow our boss or ´chef´(i think he meant chief...). Then we told him we needed to go and went down the street to get away from him when we look over and he´s standing outside of his house again watching us. Then later he walks all the way back to us (we´´d gone quite a ways down) and starts talking to us while we´re in the middle of knocking on someone elses door and it was really awkward and weird and then we had to talk to him for a while and it was also hilarious. 

The only other interesting thing that happened this week was.... Efteling!!!! For PDay today our whole zone got to go to Efteling, this awesome theme park that´s themed off of original fairytales and it was really really fun. I really enjoyed myself. I will send pictures when I have time to upload all of them. 

This is my last week of this transfer! Crazy! I have no idea what will be happening but this is extremely likely to be my last week with Zuster Parker. i love her!!!