Taking the 4th of July to the Netherlands

Happy Independence Day. It's p day. I put on all of my American colors and people have been giving me weird looks all day. But maybe not as weird when we are just in white shirts with helmets. Anyway, it feels good to be free enough to buy some marijuana if I wanted to. Just kidding. 

This week we went on exchanges with the zone leaders. What is nice is that they have a car, so we looked up a ton of people in a very short amount of time. We even got to stay dry on the way, and listen to music, and it was WIERD to be sitting in a regular car. I am so used to it being a bus if anything. We got a lot of work in since all four of us stayed in Breda. 

We also made another trip to Etten Leur on Thursday. I do not think there are many Jehovahs Witnesses there because people are always more open on the door. 

At our last zone conference, President Bunnell challenged us to pick a small area and scour it, which means knock and contact every house in the area. He told a story about how an African farmer heard about finding diamonds and went off in search for them for years. After a long time, he came back, but had to sell his farm because he had spent everything in his journey. He later died because of his poverty and broken spirit. A couple years later, them man who bought his farm found a pink and purple stone in a creek bed, thought it was interesting and put it on a shelf in his house. Some years later a man came by for a visit, recognized it as a rough diamond of considerable worth, and the man became filthy rich. The same farm that the diamond searching farmer had sold became one of the largest diamond mines in Africa. President Bunnell challenged us to scour this area, and promised diamonds to every one of us if we would keep going on the doors. So for the past two weeks we have been doing a ton of knocking. Saturday alone we did almost 6 straight hours. So far we have found some cool potentials, but no investigators yet. 

We had another lesson with Milene, the 11 year old girl. We were going to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ, but felt that she did not really have an understanding of who Jesus Christ was, and figured it would have no importance to her if she only knew he was killed on a cross. We had an awesome member present lesson, with both the member and her mother making awesome contributions. At the end, we asked her if she wanted to be baptized, and the plan is now that she be baptized in October. Her family is going on vacation for 4 weeks in a couple weeks, so it is going to have to wait a bit. Unfortunately, I will probably be transferred next week, so hopefully I do not end up too far so that I can attend the baptism. 

A nice castle that we visited today with its gardens

Yesterday, we were contacting people in the park, and Elder Knaupp was on a roll with contacting everybody. There were three sets of people sitting on benches in this one area, and we went to the first, which was a group of college students smoking weed. Most of them said they had no interest right off the bat, but one kept on trying to guess what church we were from, and after we told him we were from the mormon church, he got excited. But he didnt want to hear anything because he was just really high. A couple girls walked over to compare height with Elder Knaupp, but it turned out they are satanists, so we could not teach them either. So we moved to the second group. These people were not interested and we could not get them to open up, so we moved to the third group, two africans. The good news about Africans is that they are all religious and easy to talk to, but the bad news is that most of the time, they are too afraid to listen to new ideas. One was from Sudan, and the other from Eritrea. The one from Eritrea speaks really good english so we got a good conversation going with him. One other thing about Africans is that they love to talk. So after listening to him for probably 40 minutes, he finally asked what our message is, so we started talking about prophets and the duty of Christ, but then he went off agian. Eventually, we got him to listen to our message of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and he showed increased interest. His Sudanese frined started asking questions, so I started a separate conversation with him because he speaks a broken mix of Dutch and English. His mother language is Arabic. I was listening in on the other conversation, and heard some good stuff, notably a bold statement that none of the reformist leaders had the authority of God, and that we did and with that came the authority to baptize. I was busy trying to explain the purpose and contents of the Book of Mormon to a muslim man who spoke half Dutch and half English, but I committed him to come to church next week, because if he came, I would have a Book of Mormon and pamphlets in Arabic waiting for him. He was super excited that we had materials in Arabic. Anyway, Elder Knaupp had commited the Eritrean man to baptism if he found out if the Book of Mormon is true, and we got is number and address so that we can meet with him this week. The best thing is that he speaks Tigrinia natively, but also great English, but even better is that he also speaks Arabic and some other African language. If thuis guy gets baptized, every companionship in the country is going to need him for joint teaches so that we can teach all of the awesome Arabic and Tigrinia speaking immigrants. 

The other good news is that we finally got back in contact with somebody that we taught an awesome 1st lesson to 3 weeks ago. Antonio has not made contact with us since our lesson and we thought we lost a prime prepared investigator.

Today we went to the forest. It was nice