Dear All, Nov.6, 2011
We have spent this week in the office again, which is good since there has been so much to do. We have been reviewing the budget and the spending of each country to make sure that all has been recorded properly. This has taken a lot of work to review all the spending for each country and to correlate our records of the couples spending in these countries with the church accounts. Some countries were right on the money, others we had to spend quite a bit of time to find were the differences were and to correct them. Next year we will make an excel spreadsheet and tract each country monthly and immediately correct any discrepancies. Then at the end of the year there won’t be any discrepancy and if so they will be small and easy to rectify.
We have also been busy preparing for 2 new couple that will be coming this month as Humanitarian missionaries. One couple is coming from the states and the other from England both are wonderful and interesting couples. One of the men spent many years working in security and has provided security for many US presidents and their families, as well as for visiting dignitaries of state. He also spent years training security agents as they were coming into the country’s security agency. This couple will get some humanitarian training at the MTC in Provo before they fly into Germany. We then will have them for 3 days to build on what they learn at the MTC before they fly to their assigned country. The couple from England will be coming to us without any training in the church humanitarian system at all, and will be with us for about a week for some intensive one-on-one training. She was a nurse and a midwife; he has been man of many trades and come to us with a wide range of talents . As you can see the Lord takes us from many backgrounds and molds us into what He needs us to be to serve His children. Both couples will serve the Lord and the people of their assigned countries well.
We have also started to prepare for a 4 day humanitarian conference in March for our couples in these 10 countries. We will bring them to Frankfurt for this conference. Each couple will arrange their own transportation and Susan and I do all the rest from meals and lodging to the courses and material used to teach and train them. This will be a lot of work to organize and conduct, but hopefully very rewarding and worthwhile for everybody.
We have also been working with our couple in Serbia and the church welfare headquarters establishing an emergency response effort for some repatriated citizens back into Serbia. These people were refugees from the war 10-15 years ago, and they have now been told by the country where they were living to go back to Serbia. Many wanted to stay in the new country because there is such high unemployment in Serbia, but were forced to leave any way. With winter coming on these people are in desperate need of fuel and clothing to survive the winter. Our couple in the country will work with the red cross to try and handle the immediate needs and we have been coordinating with SLC to have winter clothing, boots, wool blankets, hygiene kits, etc. shipped to Serbia. This will require a lot of work for a number a people to get all this stuff packaged and into a container and shipped to a port probably in Montenegro and then transported across that country and into Serbia. This is a lot of work requiring many man hours by a lot of volunteers starting in SLC and all along the way through to distributing the relief items. All the items have been donated by members or purchased with funds donated to the church for humanitarian purposes.
We thought we would include some pictures from our neighborhood that we think are interesting.
This building is on the same street as Anne Frank's birth place, and we use to wonder at this strange looking building. Last week we learned that it was a bomb shelter, and was so well built that it is too costly to destroy. Notice the windows are narrow slits with a hole in the center which would allow air into the shelter. Today somebody uses it as a warehouse.
Less than a kilometer from our apt. is the house that Anne Frank was born in and lived the first 2-3 years of her life. Here is Susan standing next to a plague showing her older sister Margot, a friend and her. We walk by this house all the time as we go to various place we have to go. Frrom this house they moved toanother house not much further away. A few years after that they moved to Amsterdam Holland trying to flee the Nazi hatred.
The Frank family lived on the 2nd floor. As a young child she would have played a lot on the balcony you see here. Her father saw early on the danger for them as Jews and applied for a visa to New York, but was denied. He then applied for a visa to Cuba and 12 days before they were to leave Germany declared war on The USA and Cuba and they weren't allowed to leave, and you know the rest of the story.
Last night there was a fireside with President Uchtdorf in our chapel. The church was packed to hear him. . After the meeting he went into the congregation many of which he had know and work with while he lived here in Germany. Both Susan and I got to shake his hand as he was leaving.
He bore a very strong testimony of the divinity of Jesus Christ and that He leads the church today. He stress the importance of the Gospel and living the best we can unto the end of this life. He made the interesting remark that if we so live then death is our friend. For me it was very interesting to listen to him in German. His wife also spoke and she was so excited to be speaking German that she spoke 90 miles an hour, but her German was clear and easy to understand.
We love you and hope you have a good week.
Oma und Opa
