Guten Tag meine Familie!
Well I´ve been in germany for over a week now (almost two) and things are going great. Things have been kinda slow investigator and teaching wise but it´s fun jsut to be here and work through the hard times. We haven´t heard back from Martina or the guy who called us since the first contact. It´s sad and a little frustrating but we just have to keep going and pray that the spirit will work on them.
A lot of our focus here in Halle is on the ward. The ward has just kind of a depressed attitude about missionary work in general. They are kind of separated and not in total unison and it shows. There are a TON of less actives, or as I call them, LAMS. We have like 2 full pages of them. A lot of them don´t come because of people they dont like in the ward. I´t´s hard too because the Bishop is a really good guy. His name is Bishop Sven Berkhart. Hes been in for about 5 years but he´s just tired because the members don´t respond to any of his efforts. It´s kind of the same mindset with alot of the members. We´ve had a bunch of eating appointments with members and we always ask what we can do do bring the ward back together and how can we make it feel more like a family again. They always say something like `The ward used to be awsome but it´s just kind of fallen apart. We´ve tried so many times to fix it but I just don´t think it will happen.` They are all just discouraged and so thats why our goal is to get the ward back on its feet.
Basically all we´ve been doing is SK, Doors and LAMS. SK is basically just walking the streets talking to people. It means Straße Kontaktieren which means street contacting:) The doors are kind of wierd because everyone here in germany live in these big appartment buildings so when we do doors we jsut walk up and push all these buzzers and hope the people respond through the Microphone thing. I´ll try to get some pictures to you of some of the appartment buildings.
Since you asked here are some of my favorite places. My favorite place right now is probably the MarktPlatz. It´s the center of the city. It´s the big open cobblestone place with the giant church in the pictures i sent you. In the rainy picture of it in this email there is a little Orange and White shack-type thing on the left. That is a little Eis (Ice-Cream) stand that we go to almost every day. It´s 90 cents for one scoop and it´s way good. Germans eat so much Eis. The owner of the stand is really nice too. He recognises us when we walk by and always waves and says hello.
Little side note. When people say that Europe is very liberal with their opinions on how much of the body should be covered they underexagerating. There are pictures of 95% naked women everywhere. The motto ive found that most companies like to follow is that if we want to sell more of our product we´ll just put a picture of a lady with no shirt on our window. You have to be carefull when you look in windows too because a lot of women decide to take off pretty much all of their clothing when they are inside their house. This principle does not apply to the men though. It´s so crazy how often you see things you don´t want to!! And there are no laws and how much clothing you have to wear either.Most girls, like 90%, wear basically Daisy Dukes, or whatever they´re called, and a tanktop and thats it. Sometimes women jsut walk around with their bra counting as their shirt. It´s really annoying. A lot of people don´t wear shoes either. Well not a lot but we see at least a couple of shoeless people every day.
One last thing. If you changed my password for facebook can you send it to me. There is a photomachine here that you can log on to facebook with and it pulls up only your pictures and then you can print them. President approved it so I kind of want to try it. Thanks!
Well I think thats all not too much to report on I guess. I love you guys! Thanks for the prayers!
Elder Trevor Bone
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