A few of my favorite and not so favorite things

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My thoughts- by Elder Stephenson

Here I am at the MTC in Spain

What is it like  be a Senior Missionary Couple in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?  It has been wonderful.  At this point I (we) feel like unworthy servants.  At the MTC in Provo all the senior missionaries  were treated like royalty  by the Senior Missionary teachers and by the young missionaries.  We found the world to be small as we met old friends, the Kays’ from Minneapolis, distant cousins- decendants of Thomas Christiansen Stephenson, and neighbors of family in Emery county Utah.  The quality and strength of the young missionaries at the MTC is admirable.  The young teachers, usually return missionary students were also great.

 The building on the left is the MTC in Spain on the right is the Madrid Temple

You can see how close we were.

The experience at the MTC and Temple in Madrid was also Faith building.  The language training mission President Elder Sitterud grew up in Huntington Utah and he told me of the time he worked for my Uncle Ralph Lemon hauling hay, he said he never had worked so hard, starting at 4 a.m. taking a break at 10 and working until 5 or 6 in the evening.  He and his wife are great language training mission leaders always keeping  a spiritual focus with the missionaries in all their meetings .  The other amazing thing was the temple attendance.  We were there for two weekends and each weekend the temple would get busy Thursday thru Saturday with buses arriving from Portugal, France or Spain.  We attended 5 sessions at the temple and the sessions were taught in 4 different languages.  Those that could not speak the language chosen, usually by the native language of the majority in the session, would have head sets with channels for their particular language.   It was so beautiful to see all of Gods young children there to be sealed to their parents.  We saw children from Spain, France, Portugal, Africa, Russia. 

This is a picture of Elder Stephenson and the 2 young elders we took with us to Madrid to get our Resdencia cards on our 40th day in Spain.

playing minute to win it  with Chopsticks and 5/8" nuts

Oreo minute to win it

Eating Dinner after the Games ( chili on baked potatoes)

We attended some JAS (Jovenes Adultos Solteros) meetings and Institute Classes at the centers in Madrid.  It was great to see their depth of gospel principle knowledge and their friendship one to another.  We have been greeted with great enthusiasm and love wherever we go by the members and the young missionaries that are here.  We are trying to help the young adults move forward in their lives adopting principles that bring eternal happiness by living the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Our Family Home Evening and weekly activities have been great, they always start with a spiritual message and the activities have been playing games, having a “Minute to Win It” contest, singing Karaoke,   Elder Stephenson was careful to just watch, a visit to the large Aquarium Museum etc. 

I'm already behind

I am already behind on the blog.  We are pretty busy and I have not knitted much, but everyone here wears scarves constantly so I have decided to knit some for my new church friends who help me with my Spanish or other problems, like I had to ask a woman at church which laundry detergent was best, because my clothes were looking pretty dingy, through my limited Spanish and lots of hand signals and women's intuition she figured out what I needed and wrote down some names for me of products that would help.  The other laundry problem I have and have not solved yet is lint.  Without a dryer, there is no lint collecting and so all of our clothes have a little bit on lint on them, UGH, it drives me crazy and when you dry off after your shower your towel leaves towel lint on you.  I told Dwight I wanted to buy a hand vacuum to vacuum off all the lint.??????       I am still working on the cooking and baking.  I have not tried cookies yet, but maybe soon.  I made a pineapple upside-down cake and made enchilladas today.   They do not have much in the way of spice here so I always have my eyes open when we go into a new store.  I found cumin but not chili powder.  We thought we found a good price on watermelon but we misunderstood and ended up paying 7,45 Euros for a very small melon that's about 10.50$.  No more watermelons.  But you can buy 1 kilo of strawberries for 1,55 Euros or kiwi by the kilo for about the same price.  We eat bananas from the Canary Islands they are smaller but very nice flavor.  They have a whole aisle in the store for Yoq0urt my new favorite flavors are coconut and banana.  They also have lots of potted desserts in the dairy isle. Like flans and pot du cremes, custards etc. in little glass or pottery jars.  They are cheap and most of the ones we have tried are good.  Milk is all irradiated and is just on the shelf in cartons.  But I did find powdered whole milk which I have been using to make our hot chocolate.  It is the best.
I have been teaching English for 3 weeks now.   We have covered the Alphabet, vowels sounds, Family relations, Questions words, getting to know someone, pronouns, personal descriptions. We play lots of games  to get people to talk without feeling intimidated.  This week we are going to start verbs. ( verbs in English are so much easier than Spanish it should be no problem.  We are also going to work on going shopping ( food names).  We went to Santiago De Compostela twice in the last 2 weeks, first was to learn how to use the Church's polycom system-so that we can have meeting with other parts of Spain even the Canary Islands.  A member of the Church who lives in Santiago showed us around the Cathedral dedicated to St. James the Apostle.  Whose bones were miraculously found in Spain in the 8th century (I think).  Anyway the cathedral was beautiful and we spent about 2 hours touring, and watching all the pilgrims on foot or bicycle come to the Cathedral.

This is a picture of the incensor that would swin

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 in the nave of of the church so the pilgrams could be fumigated

This is the rope it takes 8 priests to handle the swinging of the incensor in a 30 m arch

 

 

 

 

Here we are with a traditional bagpipe player going back to the celtic roots of these people.

  We went to a town called Lugo which has an intact Roman wall on Sunday to visit the congregation there.  Most of the members are from the Dominican Republic with a few native Spanairds.  Everyone was very nice to us. It was Mother's day in Spain here last  Sunday, and the Primary(children group)  came into the women's meeting to sing for the Mom's and then present them with a paper flower that they had made.  One little boy, saw that I didn't get a flower and that his younger brother had already given his Mom a flower and so he came up to me and presented me the flower.   I was so touched, what a thoughtful young man at maybe 9 or 10, to think of an old lady like me. I am posting some pics of the last week or so with some commentary.

Starting where we are:

These are the JAS at the A Coruna Branch in Spain They had a party for us on our First Sturday Here Below are pictures of our hotel where we stayed for 3 weeks trying to get an apt. (piso). 

I have been trying to get this blog started for about 6 weeks but problems with computers or internet access or time have been getting in the way.  Then when the stars finally all aligned I thought I should start at the beginning but at this point that is a daunting task and so I am starting where we are: the here and now. I have lots of pics and think maybe I should just put them up and add words as we go.  Anything to get started. Things are great here in A Coruna. One thing before I start yaking many of you and friends but not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints so I will try and explain when I am talking church "speak".  If I miss something just ask.

Here is Dwight ( Elder Stephenson) standing out in front of our Hotel

 This is the look down the street toward the Store Alcampo (kind of like Walmart)

Thses are pictures of our Piso. there is a park right outside. And we live only about a five minute walk from the Church.

 This is a picture looking back at our apt. bldg from the metal bridge we take to cross the highway to get to the Church.

 I reolaced the fish curtain with a white one with spring flowers in this bath.

 We bought a printer right away so that we can get all our materials for English class etc. printed.

 This master bath even has hydro massage how wouldhave ever thought.

Our Piso is 2 bedroom 2 bath, hardwood floors 70m/2 , we have a nice kitchen it even has a dishwasher.  All the pisos have a washing machine and lines to hang your wash on a little terrace.  We put 2 single beds together to make our bed, because the matrimonio beds here are very narrow 135 cm. It is working great.  We used a duvet cover for the bottom sheet and another for the top, because they don't have sheets that size and the sheets here are not the thread counts of the states.  Pillows here are funny the are the length of the whole bed and so couples just have one.  This of course would not work for us. So we were able to go to IKEA our new favorite store to buy pillows for our bed. Now Dwight has his feather pillow and I have mine in polyester.
Our piso has heat some don't, but we haven't used it yet. The weather though rainy is comfortable ( at least for Wisconsinites)  It rains over 200 in /yr here and we believe it.  Everyone always carries an umbrella.

We are working with the Young Single Adults (YSA), they are age 18-30, there are about 30 in the branch.  Every young Adult we have met is great.  Most of them are from Central and South America. Only 1 is Spanish and we have 2 JAS (YSA) Jovenes Adultos Solteros investigators that are Spanish.  Here in Spain they speak a Dialect called Gallego but everyone understands Spanish, so it is just us who don't understand them. Gallego is very close to Portugese, so it sounds very pretty.  I taught my first class last night.  It was an English Class. we had 11 students from the branch (congregation) and 1 non- member.  We are thinking of adding a second class on Saturday for the many people who work late at night on weekdays.  We also have responsibilty for the youth in Lugo and Santiago de Compostela but we haven't been there yet.  We do have district meeting once a week with the Elders ( those are the young missionaries you see with the white shirts and ties) from this area, but Santiago doesn't even have elders.  I think we will be teaching English in Lugo along with FHE ( Family Home Evening) for JAS one night a week starting fairly soon.   We just got a call this morning, that we have provisional approval for our youth center. That  means that we will get funded and if we keep progressing in our numbers we will get our own center.
As far as what we eat, we are beginning to venture out alittle from bread and cheese,fruit, hot chocolate and cookies.  I make a meal each week for the JAS at our activity and I try to bring something to district meeting which is always here in A Coruna with the other Elders traveling from 1-2 hrs away.  We have tried Pasta salad, Baked potatoes with different toppings ( no sour cream here the closest is fromage blanc from France.) Spaghetti  pureed tomato with oregano, rosemary, garlic ( the spanish don't use much spice and so some of the Central and South Americans were happy to have some spice.   I also made Brownies the other day, I got the resipe from one of our nice JAS girls but what an adventure. first figure out what flour to use Trigo is wheat -  trigo Entera is whole wheat not the best choice.  I bought it first and had to use it to make alfredo sauce, it works but there were flakes of wheat germ in the sauce. Trigo harina de repostera-  turns out this is pastry flour.  I did use it to make the brownies, but next time I will look for trigo Harina de something else, and hope it is just right.  Then to the leavening agents I couldn't find baking soda finally found some 1.55 euros for 5 packets containing maybe 5 tablespoons total. I did find a little container of baking powder 2.5 Euros.  and Vanilla almost non existant I had to settle for vanilla aroma for 3.75 euro.  But Chocolate there is a whole aisle in the grocery store. I finally picked Valor pure tablet chocolate it is like bittersweet.  I didn't find cocoa in time, but later at another store Dwight found Powdered cocoa. anyway the brownies were different but good.  I will keep working on a recipe, or maybe now that we finally have internet I can find out if someone else has already reinvented this wheel. Brownies are about the only sweet they don't have here. Every bakery sweet you can think of they have in the "twinkie" aisle  like Napoilians etc. absolutely everything no wonder the flour only comes in 1 kilo pkg. who in their right mind would bake.  And the absolute best bread, Especially here is Galicia they have 2 breads call Gallego bread that are wonderful. Chewy but moist one is a huge donut shape and the other is like a turban.  We have been involved in some lessons for investigators  a lady named Susy who is amazing and so good in the lessons that we could give her a missionary badge tomorrow and send her out. She gets baptized on the 28th. 2 of our JAS are also taking the lessons they are twin sisters and are very sweet their family is from Galicia and they are friends of some our other JAS.  We have a car it is brand new an Opel Mervina and it has been an adventure driving it. There are alot more cars than parking spots in A Coruna and everyone is a master at parallel or any other trig function of parking.  Dwight is learning, and we haven't dented the car or anyone else's yet. Miracle, because every car here has a dent or scrape.  The streets are narrow and there is lots of double parking.