Elder Daniel Squires, Frankfurt Germany: A Less Trying Week and a Nazi Rock Concert

Hey Mom!

It looks like everyone had a really fun time with the 4th. That is also really cool to hear that we have sister missionaries in the ward. I don't know how it is in other missions, but I can imagine that it is similar in the fact that the sisters see a lot more success than the elders usually since they don't have to run around in white shirts and ties, so hopefully we see our home ward grow.

Well, this week was pretty to similar to last week, just without so many trying experiences. We had our appointment with the Meckel family, but it was almost like we weren't even there. We just kind of sat there as their kids went crazy and they had a guest over who was kind of needy. But we have another appointment with them tonight, and they said that this week will be better. On Tuesday, we had district meeting and Gemeindeabend (ward evening), and there wasn't much time to do anything else because we had district meeting in Jena. On Wednesday, we did some service helping a member's step daughter move, and then we worked on this member brochure that we are implementing to help our members work in unity with us. It took a long time to do, but we hope we will see a lot of success with it. We later had our English class, which no one came to again. We are going to try and have our English class once more this week, and if no one comes, we are probably going to have to shut it down.

On Thursday, we had more service, this time with our branch president, President Zaumsegel. We were helping him dig out a stump of a tree in his back yard, and it was really hard work and we didn't make much progress on it since the roots are so deep and he didn't want us to destroy the plants around it. We also had the opportunity to introduce the member brochure to him, and he gave us his support on it and helped us figure out how we are going to get it in motion with the branch. We had our weekly plan and an appointment with Sister Doerlitz on Friday, and then had an appointment that evening with a woman we found at our last street display. She had visited with sister missionaries 10 or 11 years ago, and then stopped investigating the church. She told us we could come over and meet with her, but that she was not planning on converting or anything. We went over there with all 4 of us elders. She made us dinner and just talked with us about who we were and things like that, and then at the end we read from the bible when Jesus says he is the light of the world in John 8, which is my favorite part of the new testament. Then on Saturday, I was on a split with Elder Hunter. We did some sport finding in the park and Elder Hunter was talking with this mom as I was playing soccer with her little kid. We later had an interesting lesson with a Muslim man who didn't speak much English or German.

Our last appointment was with Bruder Krause, pretty much our strongest member in terms of ward missionary work, and we shared the member brochure with him and figured out some ways we can be more united in our missionary work. Then Sunday was pretty standard. We had church, had lunch with Schwester Kretschmar, and later on did some finding. At the very end of the day we found a pretty cool guy who has had the Book of Mormon for quite a few years, so we are going to try and meet with him in the near future.

Oh yeah, and on Friday and Saturday, there was a Nazi rock concert going on in the middle of Gera, and there were some groups trying to protest it, and it was pretty nuts. There were hundreds of police patrolling the entire city, and there were groups of Nazis walking around and buying beer and stuff. We kept a good distance, but you could hear the music from pretty far away. It was pretty evil and intense. But that is what you get for serving in a red city in East Germany!

Hope you have a good week! Love you!

LG Daniel