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.