Beginning of the season

Dec 4 2016 Our planning for Craciun begins in earnest, to Deb's dismay, we began singing Christmas songs in Church today. The tunes are the same but the words will take some getting used to. On Saturday we had all the missionaries practice O Come all ye Faithful, the Romanian have some good singers, the Russians, well, lets say it was interesting. I tired to teach them to sing, like teaching a pig to dance- ooh , that was harsh. We will add a couple of sisters to their "melody" and it may work. We have a concert this Friday and this is one of the numbers- at least it will be balanced by the others. So we had a week of service, it was very good. On Dec 1 we went with the district to a village, Colonița, and did some service for the aunt of a new member, Tolio, and it went well. She gave us some fruit tea, then asked why I was not drinking mine. In Romanian, I said, if I drink, then where is the toilet? At that, she jumped up, cleaned up the bathroom and led me to it. A bit embarrassing, my own fault. We took some blankets and a hamper to a village, Falești, on Wednesday. There was a mom and son with Hodgkins disease, 1iving on 1200 lei or 60 dollars a month, in abject poverty, they had just got a load of wood from the NGO for heat and cooking. We in Canada are so blessed, it really broke our hearts that day. This NGO has spent hundreds of thousands of euros on coal and firewood for the needy and elderly in Moldova, and do this each winter, amazingly generous people from Holland. Made us want to do better. We are planning a Christmas project with them for the 23rd and 24th, it will be great to help such good people. Whenever we get a bit down, we think of the many fantastic people here who so generously help others, and we just want to do our part. Also another baptism this week, I got to conduct in English, nice. We did have a lot of small service things, cooking, teaching self reliance, etc. And snow, it began this week, Most has melted, but it was interesting for a day or two. Moldova has nice cold winds like home as well. Deb remarked that Hawaii might be nice for a mission, just not the same need I expect. Maybe Florida? No, we are fine here, really. There is an outdoor nativity in a park in 10 days or so, we hope the weather will be nice. To serve hot chocolate here, it has to be catered, for health reasons, interesting.

Christopher Nwoke, baptized by Elder Green, a very nice young man from Nigeria

Elder Green and Gore, chopping wood

Axe and ye shall receive, an axe

Sister Schow, in the gathering phase

Shiny head in the middle, that me. These shovels were awful, no curve to the blade at all

Elder Blaylock and Jensen

the group , from L, Elder Lemon, Jensen, Blaylock, Gore, Green, Anatoli, Elder Hubbard, Deb, Sisters Lee and Schow, and the aunt

Blindfold drawing, they were drawing a treehouse between 2 trees

Next 2 pictures are human tic-tac-toe. It became much more vigorous than we anticipated

Have we ever mentioned the competitiveness?
Both Deb and I love the service part of the mission, we anticipate a good season as we serve. We have no distraction of shopping or that, just serving Gods children, the way it should be.