Old Friends and New Friends

We were so excited to have some visitors at the mission office on Monday. Terhi and her husband and their cute little daughter stopped by to say hello. Terhi was a service missionary while we were on our first mission. We consider her to be our "Finnish daughter".

It is always so exciting when I realize that I can figure out something in Finnish! For dinner, we had pulled some pickles out of the fridge. I could tell that they weren't dill pickles but I wasn't sure what kind they were. As we started eating, I was looking at the pickle jar and suddenly I realized what they were. It said voileipä, and I sudden realized that I knew that voi was butter and leipä was bread! They were bread and butter pickles!

We were happy to be able to go to the temple this week. The session was in Finnish and the text was in Swedish (at least that is what I thought it was). We listen on headsets in English low enough that we could also hear the Finnish. We had a little missionary miracle at the temple that night.

A couple of days before we had a call from a church member from Turku. She of course was speaking in Finnish, but when she realized that we didn't understand, she was able with some difficulty to speak to us in English. She was trying to find a French Book of Mormon to give to someone who was visiting her. She needed it by the end of the week. We had one, but we had no way to get it to her that soon. The earliest we could get it to her was via missionaries at transfers which are next week.

She thought about finding out if there were people from Turku at the temple. But she called back on Wed. and said that the sister she spoke with didn't know where people were from. I told her that we were planning to go to the temple that evening and that we could ask if anyone there happened to be from Turku. I put it in a large envelope and wrote her name on it. a little later in the afternoon, she called us back and said to not worry about it. She would find another way to get one because it was going to be too much trouble for the people at the temple. We said OK.

When it was time to leave for the temple, I said let's just put it in the trunk just in case. After the session, Elder Shurtz asked if I had found anyone from Turku. He had been praying that we would find someone. I said that I had forgotten to ask anyone. As we were heading to get our shoes, we stopped at the recommend desk and asked if they knew if there was anyone here tonight from Turku. The sister at the desk called to a sister who was just stepping out the door and asked her to come back in. That sister was from Turku. She spoke English so we could communicate with her. She knew the woman who was needing the book and she was willing and able to deliver the book! On Friday, we got another call from the sister in Turku. She was calling to say thank-you, and that she had gotten the book. She was so grateful and said that it was a little miracle that it had worked out.

We love it when we are able to go walking in the morning before we get ready for the day. We walk past an area where for almost an entire block, the place between the building and the sidewalk is filled with rose bushes. We noticed this time that the rose bushes had almost stopped blooming. You can see in the picture that there were some new buds just opening, but most of the roses that are remaining are way past their peak. Many of the bushes are now filled with rose hips. Some of them are bright red and almost look like large cherry tomatoes.

We were happy to discover a few raspberries growing right along the path through the forest. Of course we had to pick a few. They were very tiny, but good. 

I think that this means that summer is coming to an end all too quickly! This was also evident in the flowers (wildflowers and weed flowers). We saw fire weed, already turning to fluff, clover flowers and daisy type flowers with mostly only their bright yellow centers left.

We also loved seeing the little birds sitting on the fence posts. They would fly away as we got closer. There were at least 6 on the one post, but some of them flew away before I could get the picture.

We were excited to go blueberry picking with our new friends Elder and Sister Mitchell. They are serving with the YSA and also doing videos involving the young missionaries as well as some of the longtime members. They are great! One challenge is that our p-day is Saturday and theirs is Tuesday along with the young missionaries. They offered to come with us on our p-day.

The forecast was for rain on Saturday, but it looked good first thing in the morning. We decided to leave at 8:30 to drive to Nuuksio. Anyone is able to pick and keep berries in any forest in Finland as long as you don't get too close to people's houses. 

The berries are very small and it is a lot of work and lots of bending to pick them, but we had fun. I am standing on a hill picking so I didn't have to bend over quite so far. You can see some berries in the foreground of the picture with Elder Shurtz.

I love all the moss. The ground is spongy to walk on, and the rocks are also covered with moss. It is so green and beautiful.

We stopped on our walk back to the car to get a picture of us and our berries.

About the time of the invasion of Ukraine, the mission developed an emergency plan and made very nice 72 hour kits for the missionaries to use in case of an emergency. The challenge with all 72 hour kits is keeping them current. We learned that the missionaries are asked at the beginning of every transfer to check their 72 hour kits and to take out and eat any expired food and replace it immediately. We also learned that most of the kits are probably either full of expired food, or are empty because the food was eaten and not replaced. We have a 72 hour kit in our apartment as well. We decided to unload it and see what the food in ours looked like. We discovered that it was all expired except for 1 bag of sweets and the 3 small cans of tuna. We are working on a plan for what to do about the missionaries kits, but we need to figure out what to do about ours as well.

We went to the Haaga ward today. Many of the members are still on holiday, but there were still several familiar faces. We had several people come up to us to say welcome back. One sweet couple went out of their way to come and talk to us. She spoke english, but he did not. I remembered them from my birthday party in 2019. He would speak in Finnish and she would tell us what he was saying. He said that he remembered that our daughter came to visit us, and then he remembered that my mother came to visit us. Then he said that he remembered taking a picture with us. Here is the picture from 2019,

Our Sunday dinner - Sweet Chili Lime Salmon with Peppers & Baby Potatoes. We made enough to last for 2 meals. It was delicious!

Steve made mustikkapiirakka (Finnish blueberry pie) from some of the blueberries that we picked. Sister Lehtinen had shared a recipe for it with all of the missionaries. Yummy!!

Sunrise/sunset July 30 Espoo Finland 4:55am - 9:58pm for 17 hrs and 3 min of daylight

Sunrise/sunset July 30 Provo Utah 6:22am - 8:43pm for 14 hrs and 20 min of daylight

(Espoo is losing almost 5min of daylight each day and Provo is losing almost 2 min a day.)