BOMBS AWAY!

May 25 (written and sent; not posted till June 1)

Dear Family and Friends,

This week wasn't too exciting, what with me recovering from being sick, then my companion getting sick and also recovering, but I do have some fun stories for you!

Early on in the week,m we met with our friend Nancy.  She is also African, and lives in a refugee home.  She has a fiance who lives up near Frankfurt, and she spends half her time living up there with him and the other half living down here with everyone else.  They've been working to get all the papers they need from Africa in order to get married in Germany for a really long time, and they're finally getting really close to having everything they need.  BUT, since she really wants to get baptized, and she also wants her fiance to get baptized, and with all the traveling she does back and forth, we got permission to contact the missionaries where her fiance lives, so that she can still meet with missionaries when she's traveling, and her fiance can start meeting with them too.  They're not part of my mission - I'm Alpine German Speaking and they're Frankfurt Germany, so it's exciting in itself to be able to talk with people outside the mission once or twice a week.  So progress i being made there and it's all wonderful and dandy.

The story I want to tell you however is this:

We go into Nancy's room.  She looks at us, goes "We've received some very bad news! You read German, right??" and hands us this official looking letter that's completely in German.  This letter was sent to all the people living within a 500 meter radius of a World War II BOMB that had been discovered in the vicinity.  So the Africans, recognizing the word "bombe" had called the police and asked them to translate! So we have about 3 people in this refugee home that we visit, and all of them have until the beginning of July to find a new place to live, because this live bomb that has been sitting under the building for how many years now, will need to be excavated, and it might blow up.  The possibilities of it going off are really very slim, but the whole refugee home is making a huge joke about it and it's absolutely hilarious.  Things got loud in the hallway and Nancy steps out and yells "WE NEED TO BE QUIET OR WE WILL ALL DIE!" and everyone just cracks up and goes back to their rooms.

So, essentially, we've been visiting thi splace for quite awhile now, and there's been a bomb underneath it the entire time, and the government has just figured it out.  It's just one of those situations that's unique to the area and that will probably never happen to us again, so we're just kind of laughing at how normal everyone in Germany knows this is, because it definitely isn't normal to the missionaries!!

Other than that, not much happened this week.  It's gone by pretty fast, and I'm a little freaked out by how fast time is flying.  I'm having fun though, making progress.  I've been reading a lot of Jesus the Christ this week. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's a book written by an apostle of the church, analyzing and explaining the works and teachings of Jesus Christ as they appear in the scriptures, along with historical records backing it all up.  It's an interesting read, and I"m learning a lot from it.

I'm sorry I don't have any pictures this week! Some were taken, but not on my camera, so I don't have them quite yet.  I'll make sure to take some this week though. :)

Liebe Grusse,
Sister Sally Priest