In Minden

11/3/14

Well a lot has happened in the last week. After tons of hours on planes and trains I finally got to the city of Minden. The ward has about 30 people that come regularly, and the closest missionaries are 30 minutes away by train, so we have a lot of area to cover!

The last baptism that happened in my area was about a year ago, so that’s going to change! In the last 4 days we have found 3 investigators, so that’s way big! We have 23 in our teaching pool, but only 2 we are considering progressing investigators. We technically have 1 committed to baptism, but we have not been able to get a hold of them for a couple weeks so we will see (this was all before I came). But I’m way excited to teach our 3 new investigators! One of them we met on the street and was surprised that we are here for 2 years without being paid, and was really interested in where the BofM came from, so he asked us if we would walk down the street with him to his house so he could check his work schedule, and find a time when we could come over! So cool!

Also this week I had the wunderbar opportunity to eat at Sister N’s house…… She joined the church 20 years ago, but also hasn’t been to church for about 20 years…. But how she claims to make up for it is by feeding the missionaries 2-3 times a month, and she’s been doing that for about 20 years…….. The food CAN be good sometimes, but you can always count on it to be super unhealthy…. This week we had rice, vegetables, and chocolate pudding. Seems harmless right? Wrong. She basically boils the vegetables, and rice in melted butter….. And the homemade pudding she replaced all the milk that’s supposed to go into it, and just puts butter…. and she won’t let you leave till the ALL the food is gone….. I felt very fat that day.

The food here is amazing for breakfast we eat this cereal that’s just chocolate squares filled with Nutella! It’s so good! And we’re always eating amazing bread, meats, and cheese! My comp has gained 40 pounds, but we just started to run every morning so we will see what happens! My companion is Elder O’Keefe from Pleasant Grove! He’s way cool! So way weird how my first 2 companions were in the same stake! My apartment is cool but it’s gone through a lot of Elders! It feels and kind of looks like the apartment in the best two years!

The ward is a bit hard to work with they are basically 2 families that make up most of the ward, and they are all really old. They are all pretty stubborn about missionary work. It’s also hard because it gets dark here at about 5:30 so we can’t proselyte very long, I heard by December it should be getting dark at about 4… So the winter solstice will be nice.

Ward council was also weird one of the main people in charge is this old man that was excommunicated a long time ago, but won’t come back for some reason, but he loves going to church and missionary work so I guess that’s good.

German is rough but it will get better!

Love you all!

-Elder Winkel

The one sunset pic you can see the 1000 year old monument to one of the first emperor of Germany pretty chill.