Eli Mail 1/26/15 (Zaandam, Netherlands) Letter 27

Hello everyone, and welcome to Week 12 of Zaandam with Elder Andrew! Well, I'm still here thankfully, and I'm really pumped to have another transfer or two here in this lovely little town.

Hopefully, it's just work as usual with everyone and a nice close to the month of January. Before I really begin, I would just like to say thank you to my cousin Casey for her service and example, as her mission in Spain just recently came to a close.

This week was filled with a number of odd and comical events as I transitioned from my old companion to my new one. But I'll start off with this past Monday, my last P-day with Elder Toole. At 3 p.m. we met Peter, the man we helped activate and work to get the Priesthood, and he wanted to take us on a little bit of sightseeing tour for our last day together. We went to Volendam, a nice, pretty little coastal city located at the outskirts of our proselyting area. As we drove there it quickly became foggy, and we could barely see 10 feet in front of our car (it's crazy how much moisture is in the air, here!) We arrived and went around, checking out the little gift shops, but sadly we couldn't see the main attraction, the cool little harbor! The extreme mist provided for an interesting atmosphere, but it only allowed us to see the first line of boats lined up against the docks. Bummer, but, “Oh, well.” Guess what else happened? We ran into other missionaries! It was pretty hilarious. The zone leaders based in Alkmaar and the Hoorn Elders happened to be there at the same time, and it made for a really funny afternoon. Last little note: Elder Toole and I did this photo booth thing where you have to put on these clogs and a weird Dutch outfit. I wasn't too interested in doing it, but it was hilarious in the end when we got the pictures. (Sadly, I can't send them!) 

Wednesday was transfer day, and we departed the apartment at around 7 o'clock to catch an early train. Unlike my last experience with transfers, I wasn't stuck on trains the whole day or waiting in a station for hours on end. By about 2 p.m. my new companion Elder Da Silva had arrived, so that was pleasant. We had a pretty great first day together and even got in the door with a potential and taught him a lesson (blessings!). We also ended up being on a bus in North Amsterdam that evening, too, and had a really cool experience. I've found it a little difficult and at times annoying on my mission to talk to people on public transportation, but Elder Da Silva loves it. We sat by a guy on the bus and struck up a conversation and ended up getting a potential right off the bat. My testimony of being an all-around missionary was strengthened that evening, and since then I've been committing myself to find more opportunities, even if it means just having a conversation with someone. We have a new goal going on in our mission called, "The Wrinkle in Time Project" where you keep track of your proselyting hours (they include time spent actively finding, teaching, and talking with people). It has kept me really accountable for how we as missionaries use our time, and it's been a great help so far.

Elder Da Silva is great. He was born in Portugal but spent most of his life living in Brussels. He grew up speaking Portuguese at home, learned French at school, and picked up English and Spanish with friends and on the streets. He tried to avoid learning Dutch, which made it all the more ironic when he got called to our mission. So yeah, Dutch is his fifth language. Pretty crazy. But other than language talents, he is a great teacher with a solid testimony, even for such a young missionary, and it's a good time being able to be with him.

I'm out of time, here, but I'll add one last experience. About a month and a half ago Elder Toole and I went on a whim one evening and did a couple of bell-ups and were pleasantly surprised to give a Book of Mormon away to this one guy. Fast forward to last week: Elder Da Silva and I went in to teach him, and he's from Portugal! So it was pretty cool, I kind of just chilled mostly, attempting to follow a conversation in Portuguese only via facial expressions and hand gestures (I tried my best, but I still was way off with the topic). Long story short, the guy is actually an actor with weird ideas and wouldn't let us explain much. I won't share too much, but I'll just say he thinks some weird relationships involving Jesus happened in the Bible that really didn't. 

Ran out of time, but thanks for the letters, and I love you guys!

Elder Eli Andrew

Eli Mail 1/19/15 (Zaandam, Netherlands) Letter 26

Oh my, is it really Monday again? Well, hello, everyone! I hope things are going smoothly with the transition of a new year and everything, and somehow we’re almost to the end of January, now. Quick note: I think I've hit or surpassed the mark from when I turned in my mission papers one year ago. I must say, that was a very much anticipated time for me. I spent the latter part of January and the entire month of February driving home from school every day in my big old, white Chevy truck and eagerly scrambling out the car and fast walking down the driveway to check the mail. So, I'd just like to call a little attention and recollection to the amount of things that have changed since the day my father and I hit the "send" button and turned in my papers.

To sum up this past week’s events and daily happenings in one word, it would have to be food. Just the word food, for a number of reasons, one of which being that we accidentally set two dinner appointments two hours apart on Sunday (mistake!), and the other being that we were able to have a few more dinner appointments with members than usual, which is always pleasant. Well, I suppose I will start with what we did Monday. Elder Toole and I finally got the motivation to actually do some touristy type things, and we set off to go explore the Rijks Museum located in the heart of Amsterdam. It was quite a thrill, being in such an immense and complex place, loaded with unbelievable amounts of old artifacts and paintings of deceased Dutch people I've never heard of. All and all, it was a nice experience, but even after nearly four hours of walking around and occasionally reading the printed information, we just barely skimmed the surface of the place. I left pretty satisfied, but my head was reeling with all the information that I took in. That evening we headed off on the bikes as usual and did look-ups for most of the evening. We've had a few miracles in this area called Koog and de Zaan, including three-to-four very positive potentials. So, we productively used the evening and made contact with them.

Tuesday morning we got an unexpected call from our district leader and asked if we could go on exchanges on short notice. We gladly agreed, and I spent the day in Amsterdam traveling about with Elder Besendorfer, talking to people on the streets and doing an assortment of other tasks. We have been kind of challenged to talk with more people on public transportation, which is one thing that isn't easy for any missionary. I remember the days in the MTC (Missionary Training Center) when we would set two chairs in front of each other, and we had to strike up and normal conversation with our teacher as they pretended to be a Dutch person. I've had several opportunities and impressions while traveling to talk with people, but it's a hard task to really integrate that into normal missionary work. So, that's one thing I'm praying for lately – more opportunities on "het openbaar vervoer."

Friday we had a great lesson with this wonderful lady from Turkey. A month or so ago we found her just doing typical door knocking, and we taught her the plan of salvation this week. We weren't sure it was going to actually go through, but it did, and her sister even sat in and accepted a Book of Mormon at the end. We prepared well that morning, refreshing ourselves with the lesson and finding great scriptures to enlighten her understanding, all of which lead to a very powerful and Spiritual lesson. It's quite amazing when you've done all you've could to prepare yourself and the Spirit is really just able to work through you. I love it. In terms of finding this week, we didn't have too much success numbers-wise, but I always feel satisfied when we get to have a good conversation with someone or help strengthen their own perspective on God.

Saturday was a great day. We had usual correlation with our awesome Ward mission leader (who,  by the way, loves missionary work and has a lot of ideas and innovation for Amsterdam), and then we all headed out to the Dappermarkt, a very busy market with about everything you can think of. It's a wonderful place to go finding, and we've had a few people get baptized recently just from all six of us missionaries swarming the market with pamphlets and cards. We always say in our mission that the first person is always the hardest to talk to, then it gets easier from there, and it's so true. I was a little nervous at first about it (I've done plenty of contacting, I don't know why), but after an hour of walking up and down streets, it just gets easier and increasingly fun.

Love you guys,
Elder Andrew

Eli Mail & extra note 1/12/15 (Zaandam, Netherlands) Letter 25

Hello friends, family, and fellow readers! This week was filled with lots of hard work and perhaps a few interesting stories to tell, but I´m going to be cut off in time. This week we were expecting to be able to just get into the normal swing of things – making appointments, finding – but for some reason Zaandam and all of our investigators seemed to be still longing to be in the holidays. It was a little hard this week to teach, but still successful nonetheless.

Tuesday we woke up early and headed to District meeting where we proceeded to have interviews with the Mission President (my third interview already!). It was a pleasant afternoon, and we had an exchange with the Amsterdam Elders for the rest of the day. I was lucky and got to spend the exchange with Elder Tjong Ayong for his last day as a missionary. We rushed from appointment to appointment, just trying to say one last final goodbye to everyone. We were all over the place and didn´t get home until pretty late because of it. Because of being a Surinamer, he is inherently a great cook. So, we spent the next morning cooking a frozen chicken (his favorite meal) and noodles. It was a really cool experience to be with him but sad to say goodbye to a good friend.

The rest of the week mostly entailed finding activities and attempting to set appointments. We have a big pool of people with potential but, like I said earlier, it was hard to actually teach lessons this week. We spent a couple days battling through the rain, talking to people as we went along and just having a good time together, Elder Toole and I, despite not having the weather on our side. This coming week is `taal week` or speak-our-language week, so I´m excited to see what happens when we speak only Dutch for a week straight. Things are going great here, and we have transfer calls in one week. Yikes! Love you all. Thanks for the support and emails!

EXTRA NOTE – From a separate 1/12/15 email regarding the Paris terrorist situation:

Yeah, it is a pretty big deal. It was all over the newspapers for days, and people talked about it everywhere. Thursday we attempted to take the usual tram to the church to teach our Dutch class but found out they weren't riding trams past "De Dam" because of the terrorist scare. So, we had to take underground metros all over Amsterdam in an attempt to get to the church, but we eventually made it within a reasonable time.

Eli Mail 1/5/15 (Zaandam, Netherlands) Letter 24

Hello family, friends, audience, and all other readers! I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year, because I sure did. Before I get into the particulars of the holiday season that has now passed, I would like to say how thankful I am to be on a mission. I haven't been out for too long now, but it has and is changing my life. I've been able to see the gospel in action – a marvelous wonder it is – and, as one Sister at a zone conference said, "We as missionaries get a front row seat of the Atonement at work." So, yeah, you get to enjoy some fantastic stuff if you come out on a mission.

These past two weeks have encompassed a lot of really unique memories, and I hope to share just a few of those with you. I will first start with kind of an ironic story of caroling back on December 22. The missionaries and some jovos (young single adults) all met in Amsterdam Centraal to hopefully bring the Christmas spirit and have a little fun by doing a caroling activity. Located in the main front of the station is a grand piano that reads "bespeel mij" or "play me," so it's really cool. Anyone can go up and show off their piano skills. We were hoping to nab it and sing hymns, but we were already beaten by some other carolers, which I totally expected. But it wasn't a problem. We sung our songs at another location close by and actually got quite a decent audience from time to time. We sang an assortment of songs, ranging from the Dutch hymn book to "feliz navivdad." As we were finishing up, we grouped together just chatting when all of the sudden I see a tall man with headphones on reach his arm out and slam a smaller guy into a nearby pillar. The taller man was clearly pinning this guy to the wall and had his large hand tightly wrapped around the guys' eyes. We watched in slight shock as two officers came over and handcuffed the smaller man, pulling two candy bars and soda out of his pocket. Long story short, some undercover cop had caught someone stealing, and we watched the whole thing unfold after attempting to bring Christmas cheer to Amsterdam. We did a good job though, so I wasn't worried.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were both very pleasant days. We spent Christmas Eve with the APs and an older member living in a retirement home. She's a very interesting woman and doesn't mind saying whatever is on her mind about any sort of subject. We had some conversations that left me barely able to hold back bursting in laughter, and it was just a fun time for all of us. She really enjoyed our company, and we even played this shuffle board-like game with her afterwards that turned out to be great. We spent Christmas with a few investigators and read the Christmas story out of the Bible, and we finished the day off with the long anticipated Skype call. It was really great to talk and see family again, and I appreciate my family at home now more than I used to.

So yeah, that entails most of the exciting stuff for the holiday season, except one big thing, and that was New Year's Eve. The Dutch "go ham" on New Year's. They are lighting of fireworks like no tomorrow, and it's bad enough that we as missionaries have to be indoors by 4 p.m.! It was exciting to see. Elder Toole and I turned the couch to face the windows of our third-story apartment, which allowed a very pleasant view of the insanity. By about 11:30 p.m. I was already in bed, and I assumed that the fireworks would easily wake me up at 12, but sadly they didn't. They were apparently going off nonstop like bombs for two hours after midnight, and my companion even tried to wake me up, but somehow I just slept through the whole the thing, only finding out at about 6:30 the next morning what had happened.

The missionary work has been going great over the past couple of weeks. We've seen a number of miracles. One is this 60-year-old man that referred himself to us, and we now have a new person to teach, which is a blessing. With careful planning, too, we've been able to find a lot of the people who are being prepared, and that's really cool to see.

Thanks for everyone who sent packages or mail recently again. It is much appreciated. I hope everyone has a great week and I especially hope my little brother Linus recovers quick! Love you guys!