Zwickau

Well Zwickau… it’s super ghetto. Really though. I’m about as deep in the old DDR as you can get, my area borders Czech, and the Frankfurt Mission.

My first night in Zwickau we went and played soccer with orphans, which I guess we do every 2 weeks! I accidently kicked an orphan in the head… really hard with the ball. He was playing goalie… but he was alright…. And I promise I don’t hate all the orphans in the whole world…haha.

On Thursday we street contacted a bunch and randomly ran into this guy from Iran, he invited us to his house, it was really weird. When we got into his house he had tons of every Mormon book and pamphlet. Then he showed us a photo album he had with him and the Elders from like 3 years ago, and him at the church and stuff. His English was really bad and so was his German so it was hard to communicate. He then asked us if we could help him with his mold problem.  He took us to his back room and it was just straight mold. The entire room was molded over… I thought we were going to die! We decided we would go check him out in the area book, so we gave him our number and got his and left. It turns out he was on a baptismal date but he failed the Muslim test that we have to give people to be baptized. He goes and visits Iran all the time so that kind of counts as a hostile country to Christians. So unless he plans on never going back he can’t be baptized. But we invited him to English class, he showed up and it went pretty well.

On Friday we and the sisters invited our investigators to a game night with foosball and ping pong. A couple guys from Syria showed up and I challenged them to ping pong. And the guy was pretty good, but LET IT BE KNOWN I beat W***** (from Syria) at ping pong. Our church is way cool – the attic is huge so they finished it and have a band room and ping pong tables. The ward has an actual band that jams every Monday to The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.

Saturday we went on some faith to go visit this less active super far away. There was no map for the city but we showed up looking for the street. After walking for 3 hours asking everyone, a lady told us where it was. We got there and she wasn’t home… so we left a note saying we came by. The next day at church our friend in the ward told us that she came to sacrament meeting! Because we’re new we don’t recognize anyone but he said it was the first time he’s seen her at church in years!

A member had us over for dinner on Sunday. He showed us all his old family pictures… his grandpa was a Nazi… then he showed us a picture that his grandfather had taken of an airplane that was shot down by the Nazis. The flag had a small US logo on it, and I whispered to Elder Brimhall “is that one of ours…?” and all he said was “yeah”. Then the member drove us to the huge bridge made of bricks. It was sweet.

Elder Brimhall is way cool, he lived in Hawaii before his mission, and also Arizona, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, and South Korea… his dad is in the military. The ward is pretty big.  Around eighty people at church. President Uchtdorf was baptized in this ward too!

This is honestly a terrible place, but the ward is great and it’s the people that I’m here for.

Elder Winkel