FRANKFURT PHOTOS

This week our assignment is to go through a stack of external hard drives that are loaded with photos of Europe - both church and secular.  We are to sort these out by location and subject to make them available for country websites and newsrooms.  I came across these of Frankfurt, including the Europe Area Office and the chapel door and wanted to get them on the site.

Europe Area Public Affairs Office - 11 Porthstrasse

Frankfurt Stake Center next to Area Office

Frankfurt from a bridge

Frankfurt from a park

Frankfurt from the aM Main River 

Yes, you guessed it - Frankfurt

Stop lights are really cool - you get a  yellow light
 (on your mark, get set..) just before it turns green (go!!)

GETTING TO WORK

WEBMASTER TRAINING AT THE MARRIOTT

Wie Geht’s! This week we actually began to do some stuff.  In preparation for a training session held yesterday, we got to photocopy and assemble training materials, put articles and pictures on USB drives and arrange taxis for the training participants.  On Friday evening we headed out to the Marriott Hotel in Weisbaden to meet 8 country public affairs directors and their webmaster assistants.  They were here to learn to use new software to put stories on new country websites in each country.  These new sites will give members and journalists full access to the church’s lds.org  internet site as well as continue to provide a native language web site in each country.  We met wonderful members from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Hungary, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands.  These people have been given tremendous trust to be keepers of the electronic face of the church in each of their countries.  They are charged will keeping their websites current with interesting church news articles and teaser stories, photos, video clips and information for local media and interested searchers for truth.  We trained with them all day yesterday.

 In our continuing training this past week, the Brandes took us out to the our Europe shipping warehouse, where all the publications of the church in a bazillion languages are ordered in from various printers, then shipped to local units and missions.  We also got to go to Freidrichsdorf to see the temple grounds.  We got to see the restored home on the grounds where the temple presidency lives and enjoyed particularly the original wrought iron work on the front door of the house.  The owner of the house (and owner of the noodle factory that preceded the temple on the site) had his initials fashioned out of wrought iron and installed on the door – His initials were HLT which are the German initials for LDS (Heilegen der Letzen Tage). 

Not as easy as it looks when you only have 9 feet to make a 90 degree turn!

I took these random photos this week of some of the things around here to give you a feel for our surroundings.  It is much as John Kusterle said – the Germans are quite neat and tidy (except for lots of graffiti) and take good care of their land, homes and possessions.  The autobahn is just fine to drive on as long as you stay out of the far left lane.  A couple of times this week I thought I was dead as cars passed us fast enough to shake our car with “prop-wash” or vapor trail.  I think we are adjusting well although still a reasonable level of stress as we seek to get into a rhythm and find purpose here.  

EVERYTHING is recycled. These are for different colors of glass bottles.

Our store across the street.  Fresh bread every morning.

Living room/study

Hungry missionary on P-day

Basement with little toy washers and dryers

Bath (tub and shower behind door)

Our little toy diesel car with back doors that open backwards (notice handles)

We live up in the roof cable - laundry is in the basement.

German beds designed to control population growth

                                                    

WEEK 1 IN THE "FIELD"

At the Public Affairs office with Sister Sirtl

Trying to look busy and productive

Martin and I are not feeling very useful yet but we are slowly getting to know what our responsibilities will be.  Our assignment is to be the first contact points for the National Public Affairs Directors in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.  This means we will help them with any questions they have regarding public affairs in their respective countries and help with on-going training and support.  There is no National Public Affairs Director for Iceland as we only have a couple hundred members there but the other countries are well established and we have been told they are wonderful people to work with.

This is an exciting time to be here.  Next week our boss, Sister Sirtl, and her assistant, Francesco di Lillo, will be in Italy for the official press conference announcement that the government is recognizing the Church in Italy by issuing an “intesa”.  Few faiths have successfully negotiated an intesa – or enhanced – status with the Italian government. In 1993, the government formally recognized the Church as a legal entity, but only as a charitable institution. This recognition enables the Church to own and inherit property and allows bishops to perform marriage ceremonies subject to Italian law concerning civil marriages. So this new status moves us from a charity to a church and is a BIG deal. The Church will hold a thank you dinner in Rome on November 8^th for about 50 Italian officials who helped the Church reach this status.  

Yesterday the Area Office was reviewed by Elder Russell  M. Nelson. He met with the Area Seventy, Elder Teixeira and his counselors, whose offices are upstairs.  88 year-old Elder Nelson meet briefly with us Senior Missionaries next door at the stake center chapel before heading off to Milan for meetings and then to London to visit with the temple president before heading home from a 12 day trip across Europe.  He told us that revelation is alive and well in the Church and that we should listen closely in our upcoming general conference as last Thursday President Monson received revelation that will "shape the future of the Church."  We get General Conference over the course of a couple Sundays by listening to a recording in the chapel.

We were involved in training a family history senior missionary couple and the local Family History staff who will be interviewed Monday by Tonya Papanikolas of KSL.  This training involves everything from what to wear to being sure you get YOUR message across regardless of what questions you are asked.  They were very nervous but we assured them she would be a kind interviewer.

We were taught and practiced writing press releases this week, not that we will be writing many but we will help our national directors do so. Sister Sirtl says to give ourselves a few months before we know enough to be useful.  In the mean time we're doing the best we can.

Saturday morning the kind Bradleys (Bob and Lonnie) were so good to invite us to go castle touring with them.  We drove south about 235 kilometers to below Stuttgart to see the castle of Kaiser Wilhelm Hohenzollern, built in the middle 1800’s and the castle in Lichtenstein, also of fairly recent vintage.  Wilhelm the Great was famous for uniting the various regions of Germany.  Both on tops of small mountains with excellent views.  So we now are practiced tourists and autobahn drivers.  Apparently you get your speeding tickets by mail after the camera has snapped a photo, so since all their traffic signs are not so clear, I will be anxiously watching the mail this week.

Burg Hohenzollern 

Us with Lonnie and Bob Bradley

View of Southern Germany from Burg Hohenzollern

Lichtenstein Castle

THE MTC

Here we are here at the MTC with  a record group of 118 of our closest senior missionary friends and 2,750 energetic junior missionaries.  After the first day, it feels like a great big combined HP/Relief Society meeting with the most faithful people in the world. Some of these folks are going on their 5th mission and for many many it is their 2nd or 3rd. We meet in the room where we said goodbye to Bryce and Spencer, then we break out into our 4-couple districts and learn how to teach out of Preach My Gospel. Today we taught the first lesson to a fake investigator who believed everything about the restoration but was worried Joseph was a fallen prophet and we could be back in a state of apostasy and needed a new beginning. Lots of food and a bazillion people in the cafeteria but hard to find something on the celestial diet plan, so we do the best we can and they do have fat-free dream bars. We and the other missionaries drank 900 gallons of chocolate milk over the weekend. The junior missionaries all look so young and are bright-eyed and on fire. The future of the church is in good hands. We try to sit by them at lunch and get the inside scoop on their experience. Everything is great!

By the way, I like the mission rules for seniors way better than for juniors.  The weekend after the MTC, before we flew out on Monday, we took the boat out one last time with Bryce, the Jacksons and the Busaths.  This is my first time "surfing" - needs lots of work.  Also we got to be with our little red-hair precious bundle of grandson one last time - this is the thing that is killing me and we are better off not looking at pictures  of our grandchildren too often.