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Hallo meine Schätze!

Welcome welcome as is usual and expected. You are now reading a letter from a missionary currently serving in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern/Brandenburg region of Germany. You may decide for yourself whether I have retained insanity or if the marbles have long since been let out of the bag and lost in many deep and unexplored crevices of the earth! Either way, you here to read something of a little bit more value than the casual ramblings of missionary with a keyboard. 

 

Well, with the third week of the transfer already starting. I can already feel the exhaustion of having to do so much traveling and exchanging with other missionaries. And of course I shall be exchanging again this evening. Woo! Yay for exchanges...Haha anyways this last week was interesting as is every week but of course with little variations here and there. This week’s variation being not too exciting, I usually can tell because when I try to write something, nothing actually comes to mind. But I will just go for it. So with every transfer there come new missionaries into the district. And last week I had the opportunity to exchange with one of the new elders. His name being Elder Thomas, and I am pleased to announce that I am glad to have him in the district. He is a pretty cool guy and also very musically talented, he can play like 5 or 6 instruments so yeah good stuff. But what I wanted to talk about was that we were on exchange here in Neubrandenburg and we went by one of our investigators and at first they weren't home but I mostly wanted to get in touch with their roommate of sorts because she is a single mom with 3 children. So we actually talked to her at the door and just kind of making small talk when the other two show up right behind me. So naturally we both were let inside and we sat ourselves down and kept talking to everyone and usually this single mother is kind of shy and doesn't say much to us when we are there but this time she was a lot more talkative and now adding more details, she being from Ghana made Fufu, something I have all too much experience with. And for some reason she invites us to eat Fufu with her and one thing I have learned you do not reject a Ghanaian when they offer you food or they will be offended, in fact if you don't eat every single morsel of food they will be offended. And of course she has a giant bowl of it. And Ghanaian style the three of us are eating out of the same bowl with our hands. So you are just doing what you can to force yourself to eat and not think about it. And at the end after we have finished eating the Fufu itself and the fish and there is just the soup broth left. She tells us to drink the rest of it. And she cups her hand and dips it into the bowl and just drinks the broth out of her hand. Then she tells us to do likewise and all I am thinking is eee gad! Fortunately it didn't take much effort to have her let us use a spoon but still it is not very pleasant to eat soup that you know three different people have been sticking there hands in for the whole meal.  So that was a little adventure from my week. Not to mention that we had to bike all over the place that day too. But that is another story I would rather not explain. 

The next most exciting part of the week was that there was a Leadership-Training Meeting in Berlin this last Friday which basically meant that I had the pleasure of sitting in a 6 hour long conference while my companion went sight-seeing in Berlin for the whole day....Haha but the conference wasn't all that bad. I learned a lot while I was there and we almost had a complete mutiny there for a moment. Haha I am only partly kidding too. Sometimes I am really surprised by the resistance some missionaries have towards the President. I mean in the very fact of coming on a mission you promised to support your mission president in the decisions he makes. I mean we weren't even talking about anything crazy to begin with. Let me explain, so in our mission, something that I believe is unique from the other German speaking missions, in the least it is different from the Frankfurt mission in that we are not allowed to use the informal way of saying you which is the word Du. We mostly have this rule so that missionaries don't use it improperly and go around offending Germans right and left. Well our current President is now providing a means for us where if we meet the prerequisites we will receive the permission to use this informal way of speech. Of course with some restrictions but in reality they are just guidelines and shouldn't be used in these situations anyways. And I must admit the prerequisites are a bit high just for this permission. One of these prerequisites is that you have to try going a whole transfer of speaking German 24 hours a day. So a few missionaries, and remember all these people have leadership positions in the mission, asked a few simple questions because of course, there are always exceptions and concerns. But because people didn't understand the whole purpose behind why he was even giving us this opportunity; it’s so that we can better communicate with young adults. And some missionaries freak out and start going off about how we didn't come here to learn German but to preach the gospel and they were just taking it out of context and misunderstanding president to the point where the question was almost why even speak German? Haha honestly I got a kick out of it because it was completely ridiculous. But in the end I was thinking, if I don't see these missionaries as leaders next transfer then I already know the reason why.  

To end the weekly report, the very next day we spent a whole lot of time with our branch president helping him scrape wall-paper off and then to my disturbance, to put new wall paper up. I asked him why he would do such a thing! And he simply said, "typisch Deutsch." You should be able to figure that one out without a translation. Haha and then on Sunday I gave a talk for the millionth time except this time it was actually in Neubrandenburg. Honestly it didn't feel too different than when I had to translate Brother Mills talk two Sundays ago. I just get the feeling that even when I eventually leave this area that I am going to be put in one of the very few positions that actually has more responsibility than this one. Haha that would be my luck…

However that is about as much attention-span that I have in writing a letter today. I hope you all had an enjoyable week. And I wish you yet another one. Keep the commandments and live long and prosper!

Tschüss,

Elder Foster