The Province of Drenthe

This week was very frustrating, but also rewarding. I suppose that is the normal thing to happen week to week as a missionary. The bane of our week was the stolen bike nuts. We spent a lot of time on p day last week looking for a place to buy those, and ran out of time. We didn't want to take time out of our week to look for them but having them seemed like a simple task and something that would ultimately save a lot of time. But the axle of my front tire is not metric, and we went to bike shop after bike shop and 3 hardware stores trying to find just the two nuts that would fit, but no luck. Apparently they do not know what anything but metric is and I am going to see if I can order some with fast shipping. We probably spent at least 7 hours in search of these parts. The worst part was that the first bike shop that I went to sole me a couple metric nuts that obviously did not fit. I did not realize it until we got home and tried to tighten them, and they charged me 4 euro for them . But I was tired and just dished over the money. I went back and was really mad, but there was a nice kid working there this time and he gave me my money back and referred me to a different bike store.

More pictures of the witches house. She didnt answer again

Because of the inaccessibility of bikes, we spent a lot of time walking this week. It is a good way to contact people on the way to an area, but it also takes a lot of time. Luckily, we put in all of our time and still got some good work done. We met several cool people on the door this week and capitalized on the chances that we got to share the message of the restoration. Two experiences really stood out.

First, we were knocking while on exchanges, we came across a lady who looked very happy. She had a cross on a necklace, so I asked here about her faith. After a couple exchanges, she admitted that she knew something about our church, and started mentioning something about wives and family, so I guessed polygamy, but I was wrong because she was describing family home evening. She thought it was a really cool idea that we come together to work out problems together every week. We talked more about that and later gave here a restoration lesson on the door and a Book of Mormon. She really doesn't want to be pushed, so we agreed that we could follow up in a few weeks. 

Drenths is spoken here!

Second, we had rough time exchanging back. The buses were running on weird schedules, leaving early and arriving late. At first were were a little ticked that it was taking so much time, but I remember saying that the Lord would make our time effective. On our walk home form the station, we came across a guy who stopped us and invited us to come over a couple weeks ago, but we have not been able to contact him. We talked for a minute and this time got his phone number, so it was nice to see that the Lord really does have his hand over his work.

Interesting thing about where I am right now is that it is in the province of Drenthe. The Netherlands is split up into different provinces, but the biggest differences are that with every province is a different dialect of dutch and a different culture. In Breda, they speak with a very soft guttural sound and guttural rolled "r"s. Only the farmers really speak brabants now. But the suture is more catholic, and a bit more spontaneous. There are a lot of parties in Brabant. Here in Drenthe, most people are older, everything is a bit smaller, and they like to sit back and watch for a while before jumping into a situation. Here, they speak Drenths which is like redneck Dutch. Not everybody here speaks Drenths, but most of the older people do and it is really fun to try to imitate. People that speak Drenths put stickers on their doors so that others feel comfortable speaking their more comfortable Drenths together.