8-16 October 2011

Of course, for our last P-day, we had to do some sightseeing with the Assistants. This time to The Hague. This is the Peace Palace, built by money donated from Andrew Carnegie. It is where parliament meets, etc.

Pretty impressive.

This is the peace flame, which never goes out. It's surrounded by a rock from every country in the world.

You can see the flame inside.

I liked this gate - the Assistants kind of jumped in the picture.

Also close to The Hague is the resort town of Scheveningen - this is the pretty ocean we saw.

We walked way out on the pier - you can see the coastline behind Elder Favero.

On the pier - kind of windy!

We drove down to Antwerpen for our last Sunday in the mission. This is a picture of three Dutch windmills against the morning sky we passed on our way to Belgium for our last time.

Another picture of the morning sky.

Oh happy day! Tafour, Anya's oldest son, asked Loel to baptize him on our last Sunday here. Here we are with Anya and her three boys. She and Djamil, her 11 year old son, were baptized back in May right before we moved to the Netherlands. Tafour was baptized on Oct 9th. It was such a wonderful, emotional time for us. It was testimony meeting in Antwerpen, which gave us the opportunity to share some of our feelings with our dear friends. How appropriate that our very first Sunday was a testimony meeting there, 18 months ago, and we were asked to introduce ourselves and bear our testimonies then. I remember feeling so strange and so scared. Now 18 months later, we were grateful to share our testimonies with so many people who have meant so much to us. Our kind bishop translated for us.

Loel, Tafour, and Elders Frahm and Hawkley, the zone leaders in Antwerpen. They are great missionaries. When I gave the talk on baptism, I told Tafour that we were looking forward to hearing about his mission call when he turned 19. Anya and I cried with arms around each other as we watched Loel baptize Tafour. Now she will have the priesthood in her home.

Here is Brother Nyans, our favorite ward mission leader, plus the two sister missionaries who serve in Antwerpen. Sister Harrington, in the middle, goes home with us. Sister Tanner has just been out a few months.

I needed a picture of Anya and her three boys, riding with us in the back seat of our not so big car. They never cared; they were just so happy to be going to church and especially going for a baptism!

So here I am, in my office, training my replacement, Sister Pankratz!!! Thank goodness she's served here before and is so familiar with everything! Makes the job very easy! They joined us for our Monday lunch, our last one, in the office. Afterwards the Assistants came in and one of them had to say good-bye as he's being transferred. I will miss them very much.

Elder and Sister Pankratz, with Elder Benson and Alexander - they're the ones staying in the office. Loel and I and Elder McCarlie, by me, are leaving - Elder McCarlie is leaving the office as the financial secretary to serve back out in the field.

On our second to the last day, Sister Brubaker took Sister Pankratz and I out to lunch at our favorite Greek restaurant. I called in advance, at Sister Brubaker's request, and asked if they would make our favorite cream of mushroom soup. The cook said, yes, he remembered us from times past, but said he had to run to the market and buy mushrooms!! Which he did. We had such a nice lunch with some tears shed as we talked about how much we have loved our missions and our relationships. Sister Brubaker called Sister Pankratz and I 'her two angels'. Sister Pankratz was there working in the office when the Brubakers first arrived on their mission, and now that she's back, she'll be there when they go home next July.

A very sweet family in our Wassenaar Branch invited all 7 of us missionaries to dinner! The 3 office elders, us and the Pankratz. This is their family (the Listers).

So we're at the last day in the mission field. Here we are in the office with the Saldens, Sister Pankratz, and three of the missionaries who go home with us. Everyone comes into the office on their final day for their interviews with the President, weighing their luggage, etc. Many of them requested career/school counseling with me, also.

Here we, sitting around our conf room table, once last time, for our final lunch together. I had made cookies and rootbeer floats for part of the lunch.

These two sister missionaries are acting out a super funny "marriage calendar", as a kind of spoof on our baptismal calendar. It was hilarious; we were all laughing so hard. This would only happen on the last day of the mission!

They had it all printed up, etc, with one of them acting as the guy who is on his first date with the girl and wanting to get a commitment from her and set a date to meet 3 times a week and then get married in 6 weeks time. It was all in good fun with lots of elders taking videos and pictures of it. We were all getting a little punchy by now and one Elder slipped a copy under the door of Pres Brubaker's office as he was interviewing one of the missionaries for his final time.

Elders Marshall and Hanks and Sisters De Groot and Harrington at the final mission dinner.

Elder Sanford and Elder Kuttler - E. Kuttler is from our stake at home. There were 13 of us going home the next day.
After experiencing so many final testimony meetings, it didn't seem real and now this was OUR last one. The meeting was amazing, filled with the spirit, as each missionary shared thoughts and feelings about things they've learned and how they've grown. The overall theme seemed to be that Heavenly Father loves each of us SOOO much and that we all feel so blessed for knowing this.

Here we all are in the mission home after dinner.

The next day was wild and hectic as we got up around 5:00 am, helped with breakfast, and were on the road by 7:00 am to the office to pick up luggage and get on the train to the airport. It was crazy with all 13 of us dragging our luggage (and we had tons! luckily the office elders, assistants, and Brubakers helped) two blocks down the street to the train station. We quickly crammed everyone on the train, standing room only at rush hour time, made it to the Amsterdam airport, and walked a long ways to where we checked in. The whole process took a lot longer as the airport was busy, and there were so many of us. I was getting pretty anxious about whether we were going to make our flight, but we did, last one on the plane with 5 minutes to spare!
We flew 10 hours to Seattle, and then had another quick layover in Seattle, before barely making our connecting flight to Salt Lake City. We almost lost E. Marshall as the customs people confiscated the tulip bulbs he was bringing home. But we all made it.
I wish I had taken some pictures of the airport. It was so wonderful to see all of our family, those in Utah and Idaho, there waiting for us. I went around, crying as I hugged each one, meeting three new babies for the first time who are now all a year old. Such a happy reunion!

Here are the posters they had made for us and brought t the airport, along with a picture of each of the kids that weren't there (Andy, Brad, and Heather's families.) So we put them all on the mantel for our open house after for everyone to see.

Our homecoming was filled with incredibly happy reunions with friends, family, and missionary friends. Here is a group of most of our missionaries who came - some had to leave before the picture. It was such a wonderful time to be together with some of our best friends again!
People said they enjoyed our talks and some even said now they want to serve senior missions when they can. That made us happy.

We had a little open house at our house afterwards for family and friends. Here is a small group of missionaries who were still here towards the end - lots had already left. We had about 20 there for the Sacrament meeting. It was so nice to introduce them to our family.
It was a great, emotionally packed day, and one that I will always remember. What a time we've had over the last 18 months, serving in the Belgium/Netherlands Mission. What a blessing this experience has been for us.

This is our last blog post for our mission. Thanks for reading and we hope you have enjoyed the journey as much as we have. This has been great period of growth for us personally and for our relationship with each other.

1-6 October 2011

We went to Southern Netherlands last weekend to visit the Delta Works. This Sea Lion was part of a show in a museum and water park. The museum documents a huge water control project in this river delta area. This project was built following a monster flood in 1953, in which over 1800 people lost their lives.

The flood was caused by a storm surge that came in from the coast through the mouths of the Maas and Waal Rivers. The storm surge was so high that it breached the existing dikes and flooded the countryside. The same thing happened many times over the years, the most devastating in the 1400's when over 10,000 lost their lives. In the distance the flood gates are visible.

The project took 30 years to complete and cost 2.5 billion euro ($3.7 billion). It costs 15 million euro a year to maintain the flood control system. The huge pylons are in the background.

The construction was a revolutionary approach and because there are no mountains in the Netherlands, the rock was brought from Germany. Each of these large rocks was individually placed and weighs 10 tons.

We walked out to the flood gates and walked through the interior to get to the gates. We went down to the delta with Elder and Sister Beckstrand.

This one of the over 60 gates in the project. They are kept in the open position to maintain the ecology of the delta area. In some flood control projects in the Netherlands, fishing has been a casualty of flood control. In the delta, it was paramount that the ecological impact be minimized. If there was no water control in the Netherlands, 65 % of the country would be under water. The Dutch have been fighting the sea for almost a 1000 years.

This picture shows the large hydraulic pistons that raise the gates. It takes a while to open the gates, but they can be closed in 1.5 hours.

The top red line on this pillar is level of the flood waters in 1953. That's a dramatic difference from the current level. This was at low tide, so the water is pretty low.

On the day we were there, they were running a marathon across the flood gates. There are gates at about eight different areas and the marathon covered them all.

We took a boat trip to see the water works from an open water perspective.

In the distance, the little black dots are platforms that ropes hang down and mussels are raised on commercially.

This is a good view of the flood gates in the up position.

This isn't the ocean. This one branch of the mouth of the Maas River. It's huge.

On our way out of town, we drove to the little town of Veere, pronounced like "Fear". This is a picture of a neat church we saw there.

The Beckstrands took us to a little kibbling stand where we had kind of like fish and chips. It was a very warm day, like in the 80's; beautiful weather.

Our Monday lunch was a birthday celebration for one of our Assistants, Elder Bastian, in the middle. We ended up with four extra elders for lunch that day!

This is our Den Haag District - there are 13 of us. We had to take a picture since it was our last district meeting together. Here we are in the office.
We had the best district meeting. Elder Alexander assigned each of us an apostle last week to listen to during general conference. It was great because you never knew when your apostle was going to speak, so I listened so intently and took notes during every session, waiting for my apostle. Finally, he spoke, the second to the last speaker of the entire conference! We watched every session on the internet - it was so nice. We loved having such nice, uninterrupted time to just enjoy conference. There's nothing like conference in the mission field.
So in district meeting, we all reported on our apostle's talk and had a wonderful discussion with all of our missionaries about how these talks relate to us right now as missionaries. It made me want to do something similar with family when we get home.

This is a sweet card that our district gave us at the end of the meeting. When the sisters hugged me good-bye, we cried.

Let's see, how many pictures do we have of missionaries eating lunch like this one?? This was a special training meeting the President had in the office and everyone is enjoying pizza at lunch. I contributed some peanut butter bars.

These are two neat city seals in a little frame that a dear friend gave us here - too bad they're sideways, but one is of Rijnsburg, where we live, and the other is of Leiden, where we work in the office.

I was walking around Rijnsburg this morning and noticed this really cute little windmill in someone's front yard, so had to go back and take a picture. The weather has gotten very cold, rainy, and windy - a drastic change from last weekend where we were hot and in the 80's.

And guess who has returned to serve another mission in the Belgium/Netherlands Mission! The Pankratz, from Tooele, Utah! Here they are at the Amsterdam Airport where we picked them up today. They decided they wanted to serve another mission and have been home for 5 months but have now returned for 18 months to take our places in the office. They are true gems. They are the ones who were working in the office when we got here so they trained us, moved out of the apartment in Brussels that we then moved into, etc. Now it's the opposite - we will be training them starting on Monday (they need to get over their jet lag this weekend!), then they'll be moving into our apartment and taking over our job as the office couple.

It was so cute; when Elder Pankratz walked out the gate at the airport, he said, "We're back!" He looked so happy. And Sister Pankratz looked great, too, and started to cry. They are the sweetest, most dedicated people you'd ever want to know and we're so thankful that the work will continue to move forward with no gaps in support for the mission. The Saldens were there with us to greet them, along with Sister Brubaker. We are all SOOO happy to see them again.