Liebe Familie,

This week was most excellent. :]

At English class, I gave away seven Books of Mormon this week. My class is getting so big, and the Iranian people are so genuinely interested in our church. I am so excited to see what happens with them. I would say the biggest problem is the language barrier – they all don’t speak English or German, the only two languages I pretend I can speak. But, we have a guy in our ward whose mother is Iranian, and she spoke it in the home. He is married to a woman from France (and I think he was raised in France, too), so we all assumed he was French all this time. He is the ward clerk, so he saw our teaching record, and the comment on the side of the language barrier problem. Then he told us his family history and said he is more than willing to help us as much as he can. He came to the JAE center on Tuesday night to meet a couple of the people. And his wife is coming this Tuesday or Thursday to meet the mothers. The mothers were complaining that since their children don’t go to school, they don’t have a lot of friends. The French family’s kids are home-schooled, so they can totally be friends with each other! Isn’t it amazing our intricately the Lord takes care of us?

Wednesday was pretty great, too. We had our Filipino lesson, and this time Dolores brought a friend, too! We reviewed Ether 12 from last week, and talked about where the Book of Mormon came from. The best part was after we read the first paragraph of the introduction, and we were talking about why that was important. Sister Banban and Sister Dalit had both commented (in Tagolag and Engish), and I said (in English) that I loved how it said that the fulness of the gospel was contained in the Book of Mormon. Then Dolores said, ‘Exactly! If more churches used the Book of Mormon, there would not be so much confusion on the earth.‘ Dolores is great!! We are so stoked about her and her friend!!

That night, we had our first lesson with Danielle. We were very nervous, but so was she. :] We taught the first lesson. She believes so much, but she has a few hang-ups: polygamy and the need for such a long apostacy. We are going to try to resolve those concerns tonight, so news on that next week. I think the bigger concern will be her family, though. They are very active Lutherans who are not thrilled that she is meeting with us. She feels that she needs to continue, but we can see that she isn’t just going to peace on her family. But, Danielle is great, and I am sure something will work out so that they will be supportive of her baptism. We are very excited to continue teaching her!

We had Sisters Konferenz this week. All 24 sister missionaries in our mission came to Munich for a few days. There is no direct train from Graz to Munich, so the Graz sisters had a sleepover with us Wednesday night, and we traveled together to Salzburg Thursday morning. We missed our train out of Vienna because we read the board wrong and were standing on the wrong platform! About the time we realized it, the train doors locked, and we were stuck  at West Bahnhof. But, another train was headed to Salzburg in an hour, and there was another train leaving Salzburg for Munich an hour after we were to arrive in Salzburg. Our train ended up being delayed 45 minutes, so we had to run when we got to Salzburg, but we made it to Munich!! We were the last ones, but it was okay.

We went on a bike ride on Friday. We rode through Englischer Garten. It. was. gorgeous!! Think Mary Poppins. It really looked like something out of a musical. Mensch. We also got to see a lot of cool historical sites/buildings as we rode through downtown Munich. So much fun!

Yesterday, David, Wanni, Danielle, Sister Constante, and one of our Persians came to church!! It was so great!

After church, we met with David. Mariusz, a native of Poland from Wien II who sat with David in church to help with translation, stayed for the lesson. His German is way better than his English, so the English-speaking sisters taught in German for it to be translated into Polish. Oh, the joys of serving in the international ward. :] But David is great, and he is still on track for his baptism!!

I think that is about everything for this week! Good luck with school and work and such!

Ich liebe euch!!

Liebe,

Sister Stephanie Reid