Connections

This has been a busy week, with transfers and missionaries coming and going. 

On Monday morning, Elder Shurtz made blueberry pancakes for breakfast using some of the blueberries that we picked last week. They were yummy.

Elder Shurtz wants to get ads in the mail, particularly ads for grocery stores. All of the missionary apartment mail slots (including ours) say "ei kiitos mainoksia ja ilmaislehtia" (no thanks to ads and free magazines). Elder Shurtz took our sign off of the mail slot hoping to get ads. It took over a week, but he was so excited when we got home on Monday to find that he had ads! 

Unfortunately none of them were grocery store ads.

 It has been a very cloudy and rainy week! Every morning when we have gone on our walk, we have had varying amounts of rain. We took a picture on our walk on Wednesday.

I order 120 copies of the Book of Mormon in Finnish every two weeks. They are usually delivered to our office a week or two later. This time however we got a notice that they were going to be delivered between the hours of 16:00 and 22:00. We are usually not at the mission office for most of those hours. In the notification there is a link where I can go for other options. The other option is to have them delivered to K supermarket at Derby. We have picked up packages there before. That is the option that I chose. I was confused though because there were 7 boxes coming. There are 20 books in a box, so we usually get 6 boxes. We picked up the 7 boxes on the way to the office. We put the 6 boxes in the varasto and brought the 7th into the office so I could see what was in it. It was 12 copies of the Book of Mormon. Going back out to the varasto, I saw that the 6 boxes were all labeled as having 18 books. The boxes are the same size as before. I compared the books and the new ones seem to be a tiny bit bigger. They were a couple months newer printing and I think must be a different printing company. I guess now I will order in multiples of 18. You can see in the picture the boxes on the left have 18 and the boxes on the right have 20.

We thought that this was an interesting thing that we saw in the store just inside the door. 

Koiria means dogs. So, we think that if you bring your dog, you can put it in the kennel while you shop.

Shortly after we arrived on our mission, I saw this interesting little appliance in our kitchen. I asked Sister Bridge about it and she said it was an egg cooker. We had bought some riisipiirakkas and decided to make some egg butter to go with it. I was very impressed. The eggs peeled easily and were cooked just right. 

The egg butter on the riisipiirakkas was delicious!

We went to the temple on Wednesday evening. We took some quick pictures of the beautiful flowers afterwards. We really love this little temple!

One morning as we got ready to go on our walk, Elder Shurtz was putting on his nametag and started laughing. I looked over and he said "I guess that's what happens if I put my nametag on while looking in the mirror! He got it fixed before we walked out the door.

On our walk we noticed two big tractor type things out in the field that is a driving range. The tractors were really quite large, but looked so small in the big field. We watched for a while and noticed that the blue one was going around first and it appeared to be picking up balls. The red one was mowing. We could see quite a few balls that had been missed. I think you can see at least one in the picture if you look for it.

We were getting ready to do orientation with the new missionaries and were trying to update a power point presentation that the Bridges had done. So we got this picture of us with Sister Saarinen to use in the presentation.

On Friday, we noticed several mushrooms on our walk. I am quite fascinated with the mushrooms.

Elder Shurtz used some more of our blueberries to make blueberry muffins. Then we put the rest of the blueberries in the freezer to use later on.

A mom of a new missionary who was arriving Friday night had purchased a coat for her daughter from a Finnish company. She put the mission office as the delivery address and our office phone number and email as the contact information. She emailed me and asked be to watch for it. We started getting emails on the mission office email regarding the order. The challenge was that they were all in Finnish. I would copy and paste and put it into google translate. I wasn't exactly sure how it would be delivered, or where, so I was watching closely for it. Finally I got an email saying it was ready to be picked up at Wolt Market, which is in our office complex. We had seen lots of bikes being ridden around with young men with big blue cubes on their backs that said Wolt, but we really didn't know what it was. 

It was explained to us that it is basically like door dash, but it is mostly for groceries and household items and it is also doing things like package pickup and delivery. 

We were able to walk right next door and pick up the coat.

The fun thing was that when I emailed the mom to tell her it had arrived, 

she told me that she was good friends with my cousin Shawna Baker! 

I love finding connections like that. Just before we came on our mission, Amelia Hostetter, a friend from our Chicago days told me to watch for 3 missionaries in our mission that she knew. She knew one from when she lived Bluffdale Utah, one she knew from living in Kansas city and one from Florida where she had recently moved. The assistants came in one day and asked me if I knew an Amelia Hostetter and when I said yes, they said that Elder Scwemmer was asking. 

There is one district who holds their districts meetings at the mission office. We met the missionaries as they came for the meeting and when I met Sister Beasley asked me if I knew Amelia Hostetter. 

Also, this week I got an email from the mother of a missionary who was just starting her week of home MTC. It was Sister Gooch's mom, and I was able to tell her that Amelia had told me to watch for her. 

With transfers, one of the assistants had completed his mission and returned home. We got a new assistant, Elder McArthur. He looked a little bit familiar to me. I remembered that when we first moved to Chicago, we met Gregg and Theresa McArthur. They had several children and I could remember the names of a few of them. I asked Elder McArthur what the names of his grandparents are. Guess what? He is the grandson of Gregg and Theresa! We knew his dad when his dad was a teenager!

Saturday morning was new missionary orientation. 

We were grateful that Elder and Sister Bridge left us the power point presentation 

so we weren't starting from scratch. Not great pictures, but it is what I have.

We were missing one sister. I got an email on Friday morning that said that one of our sisters would be delayed. She was coming from a mission in Washington where she had been serving for the past transfer. Apparently her first flight to Denver was diverted. She finally arrived in Denver over 5 hours late, so she missed her flight to Frankfurt. Church travel booked her a hotel and a flight the next day. About a half hour later, I got another email saying that the hotel had turned her away and they didn't seem to care that they had a reservation. The travel agent had tried finding another hotel, but was not able to do so. The missionary was able to catch a shuttle back to the airport where she had over 12 hours to wait for her flight. I was able to reach out to her via facebook messenger and let her know that we were aware of her situation and we were praying for her. We will meet with her on Monday to do a quick orientation with her. 

One of the sisters who did arrive with the rest of her MTC group, found that her bags were missing when they arrived. We have been working on that ever since. It is quite complicated because when she first checked in, the agent printed the boarding pass and bag tags, tagged the bags and put them on the conveyor. When the missionary looked at her boarding pass, she realized that it wasn't actually her, but someone else with the same last name and the same first letter of their first name. The things were reprinted, but the bags were now gone. They said that they called and the bags would be retagged, but we are afraid that they may not have actually been retagged. Also the flight was booked with United, but the first leg was with eurowings and the second leg was with Lufthansa. 

We are praying that somehow she will be able to get her bags.  

It was nice because we felt like we already knew this group of missionaries a little bit. 

We consider them to be our MTC group since we were there for 1 week of their MTC time 

and we were able to meet them at the MTC.

There was a baptism in the afternoon. We stayed at the church so we could attend the baptism. There was a father and two of his boys and a woman whose husband is already a member. It was pretty exciting to have 4 baptisms in one day! They are all in the International ward. Maybe you can see from these pictures what a wonderful variety of people there are in the International ward. 

We found another connection. The person who gave the closing prayer was Brother London. 

He is the brother of the Elder London who served in the mission office just before we arrive in 2018. 

We went to the international ward for church today. 

I remembered that we still needed to get a picture of Sister Airto, so we were able to do that.

After Sacrament meeting, a woman came up to us that looked a bit familiar to me. It turns out that she served her mission in the Nevada Las Vegas West mission while we were serving there. She recognized us and came up to say hi. She was visiting with her husband. Her husband's mother grew up in Finland, but then has lived in the USA since she was married. It was so fun to run into her at church.

There was a break the fast for the YSA after church which the Mitchells invited us to attend. 

As we left the building, I realized that we had never taken a picture by that building. 

We tried to get one with the Church sign, but because it is on the window, it is a bit difficult.

The building is in a prime location. You can see that the water is not too far from the building.

Sunrise/sunset in Espoo Finland 5:11am to 9:41pm for 16 hrs 29 min of daylight.

Sunrise/sunset in Provo Utah 6:29am to 8:35pm for 14 hrs 6 min of daylight.

We are losing just over 5 minutes of daylight a day and Provo is losing just over 2 minutes a day.