Santa's Village

Snow for days

Hey everybody! Happy Groundhog day! Also again happy birthday to Brittanie! Honestly I remembered that it was Brittanie's birthday, but I had totally forgotten what Groundhog day was so thank you for the reminder haha It sounds like it doesn't even matter if the little critter sees his shadow or not since you guys are having such a warm winter! That's awesome! The weather hasn't been too bad here either, it's been even warmer than it was last year but like it's still -10 and is getting colder this weeks so still pretty cold. The main thing though is that there's just tons of snow. There's just massive piles everywhere we go and it hasn't stopped snowing for days. It just keeps coming. A couple weeks ago I saw these three little girls walk out of an apartment building and just start ice skating down the street because all of the streets are completely frozen it was so funny! I see people cross country skiiing all of the time and babies being pulled on little sleds but that was the first time I saw people ice skating on the street. 

 

Well we had another really exciting week! The work here just keeps going well, we've found a ton of cool people lately and all of the lessons that we've been teaching have been going really well. Unfortunately our little Finnish family's baby was up all night on saturday night and so they didn't come to church on Sunday. But they said they were way sorry and that they will come next week for sure so I really hope that works out! They are doing well though and still reading and praying and everything. We found this american girl over a week ago and she came to Family Night last night at the church so that was way good! I think she enjoyed it and made some friends and so I bet she'll come to church on Sunday as well. We also have this way awesome investigator that is like a 30 year old lady from Russia. She's married to a Finn and speaks pretty good finnish and has a little boy and she is super interested. We've taught her twice now and we brought a member along who served his mission in Russia so he speaks some russian with her and explains things more clearly for her and things are going really well. After our first lesson she read 8 chapters of the book of Mormon and said she would pray about it this week and she's just way cool. We also found this super sweet family this week that is from Vietnam. The family consists of grandparents, a 16 year old boy two other boys and then a little adorable 8 year old girl. All of the kids speak pretty good finnish but the grandparents don't speak super well but the kids are good enough to understand what we say and then translate for the grandparents. Unfortunately they don't speak Vietnamese they speak some little local language (they're from some little village up in the mountains) so we don't have any church materials in their language which is tough. But they've been in Finland for a while and they go to the Lutheran church so they are Christian and are super down to learn about the Book of Mormon. They are just such nice people, we're going over to their house tonight! 

 

Temple Trip Selfie

We had a way busy week though in addition to all the good stuff going on up here. On Thursday we had to drive down to Vaasa to do a baptismal interview. I did the interview. The guy that got baptized is this 19 year old guy from China he was so cool! He had such a strong testimony and I could really tell that his newfound belief in God had changed him a ton. He was just super excited to get baptized and it was a way cool experience to do his interview. After the interview we drove back up to Oulu then we hopped on a plane that left from Oulu to Helsinki. So got to Helsinki Thursday night and slept at the mission home. Then we had our leadership meeting all day on Friday and went to the temple that night. Then we hopped on a night train and came back to Oulu. So it was a ton of traveling and way crazy but a ton of fun. This week I'm excited because we got to go to Rovaniemi to do splits. Rovaniemi is the norhernmost city in Finland that has missionaries in it. (It's also the northernmst city in the entire world with missionaries in it year round) I've always wanted to go to Rovaniemi so I'm super excited. I'll take lots of pictures. Hopefully I get to see Santa's village (that's where Santa Clause lives). I'm also planning on eating some Reindeer Rovaniemi is famous for it's reindeer pizzas. Alright well that is all I've got for the week. I love you all so much! Have a good week!