We broke out of the 1 good week- 1 bad week cycle this week and had our 2nd straight good week. haha It's hard because people can be pretty flaky, but we are starting to find some people that are pretty consistent.
A laugh:
Often times when we speak with college aged people we contact them in English because they think it's sick when Americans speak English to them and it forces them to listen. Usually when we speak dutch, the dutch person controls the conversation because they are better at speaking but that totally gets reversed when we speak English! Anyways, we contacted this girl in English and she was pretty interested but then halfway through the conversation she figured out we spoke dutch and flipped out. ha ha. She didn't believe we were Americans or from a church, so we spent the next few minutes showing her our residency cards and ministerial certificates to keep her from calling the cops. After putting out the fire she ended up setting an appointment up with us, but she was really scared. The struggles of working in the ghettos.
The Lows:
We got dropped by our Ex-Jehovah Witness guy because he claimed that we don't believe in heaven or something, and we showed him a scripture that supported his beliefs, but he wouldn't listen. Almost 100% positive that he found something bad about us online and was looking for an excuse to stop meeting with us. Like I always "Search and ye shall find" is true for all things. If you look for the bad you will find the bad, but if you look for the truth you will also find the truth.
We won't be meeting with some of our favorite investigators this week because everyone is busy with work. Not the end of the world
The Highs:
While planning for our week we felt the need to pick a new neighborhood to work in, so we looked on the map and google to scope some places out and we both really felt like we needed to go to this particular street not too far from our apartment. We got in the car and headed there as soon as planning was over and stumbled upon a miracle! We found a girl that was baptized as a young teenager (8 years ago) but had since moved and no one knew where she lived because she was inactive at the time of her move. She is in her young 20s and about to have her first child. We should be going there this week to get to know her!
The zone has been killing it with new investigators. We now have 32 gators out of our goal of 45. This is the last week so we will have to work hard to reach our goal!
This week we did service as part of the Netherlands's National Service Day. We built a park with a sand pit and man was it tough work! We had to move 1 ton of sand to the pit, an actual ton,--not just an exaggeration. I took a least 30 full wheel barrels full of sand from the truck to the park. exhausting. Luckily there were 4-5 others that were doing it as well. One thing I learned is the work ethic of a bunch of Mormon Missionaries is incomparable to a bunch of Dutch College Kids. We showed up and started shoveling and wheel barreling and etc for 3 hours straight while they took a 30 min break every 30 mins... (also note: the dutch guys were just painting, so the easy stuff.) We ate lunch then went straight back to it for another 3 hours. So even though they think we are crazy for coming to this county to preach about Christ, at the very least we have definitely learned how to work.
We got an investigator to church yesterday! That's huge! I think I've only gotten 3-4 people to come to church my whole mission. This lady is a super sweet mother of 2 from Suriname and we felt like the talks were perfect for her. All 3 speakers were woman and the last was the Young Woman's President who spoke about what they teach the youth and it was perfect because her children are 14 and 10. The members reached out to her perfectly. She left after the 1st hour, but she said next time she wants to bring her children with her, so in a couple weeks she should be back!
It's crazy hard to believe that its almost my last transfer! Ill finish strong and be much ready to come home!
Was a great week!
Love you guys!
--
Elder Talyon Anderson Perry
Belgium/Netherlands Mission