Hello Family!
It was good to get your e-mail! I´m glad things are going well for you all besides the sicknesses that are going around. I myself, unfortunately, was also sick this week. Hence, I have sympathy We´ll get to that later.
Actually, might as well get to that now, haha. Tuesday was Zone Conference like you all know. The whole train ride there I felt like I was going to puke. Luckily I didn´t. The whole conference I was praying that I could hold down whatever wanted to come up. That worked too. But as we traded companions around and My companion left to Eisenhüttenstadt and Sister Risenmay from Tiergarten was my companion for the next couple days I couldn´t hold it any more and I did hurl... A couple times. And another Elder from Rostock threw up just a couple minutes before me. It was weird that it struck at the same time. We thought it was maybe food poisoning, but we didn´t know why it would hit us and not everyone else that ate with us too. It still remains a mystery. Ohh! I even threw up on the train. I was sitting there feeling normal and then all the sudden I was like "Oh mensch I need to hurl!" so I ran to the bathroom. I had to go to the other box car and through a couple doors so I was praying in my heart again that I wouldn´t hurl all over and make the patrons suffer. Luckily the toilet lid was wide open when I finally made it into the bathroom. That was a tender mercy. That was a LOOOOONG ride home. I was really surprised how not-dead I look in that Zone Picture because that was a couple minutes before I threw up.
Zone Conference was awesome though! It´s always wonderful to get motivated and find some things that we need to improve. This Conference´s theme was using our time wisely. Our life on earth is so short and our life on a mission is even shorter (even though some of us like to pretend we´ll on missions for the rest of our lives because we don´t ever want to leave.) It really put into perspective of how we really need to give everything we have because it´ll be gone one day. Our President´s motto is "Start Right, Work Hard, Finish Strong" normally I applied that to the mission in general, but they talked about it as a day for day thing. We need to wake up and start right, work hard through out the day, and finish strong and not wimp out at the end of the day. I was so pumped to go work hard after Zone Conference, but unfortunately I couln´t and we had a really cruddy week. We´re ready to have an awesome week this week though.
As for tausch, it seems like everyone had a great time. I feel really bad because Sister Risenmay was in Rostock, a city she´d never been in and she had to stay in the house all day with me. As far as I know she didn´t catch the bug. Anyway, luckily we have a Senior sister that speaks German and so I sent them both to an eating appointment with a member who feeds us every week (Bruder Schmidt. He´s AWESOME!) I couldn´t let Sister Risenmay miss out on that experience.
Sadly, the rest of this week has been me trying to recouperate (I CAN´T SPELL ANYMORE). We only have a couple items of news. The lady who I gave a Book of Mormon to called and cancelled the appointment and told us never to call again and to delete her number (she seemed kind of like she had some special needs so we weren´t too devestated. She doesn´t need us to get to the Celestial Kingdom. We´re thinking someone told her we are a sect or a cult or something. Sad day.)
Another interesting that happened yesterday was we were waiting to get on the Straßen Bahn after a ward potluck and there was this crazy drunk German that came up and started yelling at this homeless guy that was sitting on the curb minding his own business. He looked sad and cold and tired. It was really sad, but we didn´t want to get into something that we weren´t involved in. We went to our apartment feeling really crappy that we didn´t at least stand up for the guy. My companion was really mad at herself for it. Then she had this brilliant idea! We had some left overs at the church from the potluck. We could go back and find him and offer him some food. We called the Elders so we wouldn´t be alone with him in the church and went and looked for him. As we were frantically searching through the streets for him, I had this thought "There aren´t many people that you can outwardly see the suffering, like with this guy. But there are many that are suffering like him on the inside. We should be looking for these people with as much urgency as we are searching for this guy." It was kind of an eye opener for me. Anyway, it ended up he was from Brazil (He looks German, it was weird) and he had some major problems. Something about politics and losing some important papers so he is just living on the streets all over Germany. We gave him some food and he ate like he was starving (4 hot dogs, a billion carrots, a package of ravioli, a few bowls of jello and I think more but I can´t remember). My companion gave him a pair of her gloves. We felt like we did such a good thing. The whole time this man was eating he had a huge smile on his face. It was awesome. It was a good way to end a stinky week.
Funny story: My companion put on her clothes before church then noticed they were wrinkely. I left into the other room and then a couple minutes later I said to myself "I smell Hot Pockets". Two seconds later my companion comes out of the room goes to the fridge and grabs a cold water bottle and puts it on her neck and says "I´m such a fool." She had tried to iron her clothes while they were on her. It was quite hilarious, I couldn´t stop laughing.
I said Jeff is having letter problems not because of his e-mails. His e-mails are great. I said he´s having letter problems because of the lack of Valentine for Rachel and the lack of quarter and dollar in his letter. That´s why I said he needs to improve his letter skills. :)
Mom, that´s a HILARIOUS dream. That isn´t something that we regularly do, although it would be fun. But there aren´t really any hills or tires around here. I also had a couple weird dreams this week. I think it was due to my illness. Anyway I had a dream that I carried Lilah up a rope ladder and there were 3 hammocks. We laid on the 2nd hammock and I tried to teach Lilah how to say Danke but she only would say thank you and it was frustrating. Then I looked up on the hammock above me and there was a HUGE spider (kind of like the Gilligan one except yellow with black legs) It had 16 eyes and I was screaming for help, but no one would help me. Finally I kicked the hammock above me and the spider flew off next to dad. He happened to have a power hose in his hand and he sprayed the spider with such force that it sprayed against a wall a considerable distance away and it flew up the wall because of the power of the water. It then landed next to mom where she poked it with her finger and said "Hmmm... I didn´t know that hose cooked animals." It was weird. Also I told D.J. that he should come on joint teach to Svetlana even though he wouldn´t understand anything, it would be a really good experience for him. Random random.
Mom, that´s a HILARIOUS dream. That isn´t something that we regularly do, although it would be fun. But there aren´t really any hills or tires around here. I also had a couple weird dreams this week. I think it was due to my illness. Anyway I had a dream that I carried Lilah up a rope ladder and there were 3 hammocks. We laid on the 2nd hammock and I tried to teach Lilah how to say Danke but she only would say thank you and it was frustrating. Then I looked up on the hammock above me and there was a HUGE spider (kind of like the Gilligan one except yellow with black legs) It had 16 eyes and I was screaming for help, but no one would help me. Finally I kicked the hammock above me and the spider flew off next to dad. He happened to have a power hose in his hand and he sprayed the spider with such force that it sprayed against a wall a considerable distance away and it flew up the wall because of the power of the water. It then landed next to mom where she poked it with her finger and said "Hmmm... I didn´t know that hose cooked animals." It was weird. Also I told D.J. that he should come on joint teach to Svetlana even though he wouldn´t understand anything, it would be a really good experience for him. Random random.
I can´t believe you still had that orange chocolate!! That´s crazy. I like the comparison to studying the scriptures. Did you pray while you were eating the chocolate? That would´ve been the perfect comparison if so! :)
My hair really is growing like crazy. I even chopped it all off before I left the MTC. I don´t know if you could tell from the pictures at all, but it really is growing and it makes me happy. It´s super fast to scrunch it and fast as a missionary is good.
Deej looked SO snazzy in his tux. I hope he had fun. Good ol´ days of high school. They feel like forever ago, but not. Weird.
I don´t know if you´ll get a billion e-mails from that website. Sister Holbrook really enjoys it, that´s all I know. Sister Holbrook is also on the Germany Berlin mailing list so you could talk to her. She´d love that.
We see the Elders pretty often. I´d say 5 out of the 7 days. They are in our branch. there are 6 missionaries in this branch. 2 Sisters 2 Elders and 2 Senior Sisters. It´s really small. I´m not quite sure why we have so many, but Heavenly Father does so I won´t question it.
I love you all so much. I know that this gospel is true and that it is the only thing that brings true happiness. I hope we try more and more every day to pray to see opportunities to serve others... not only to see those opportunities but to have the courage to go through with serving them. Don´t hesitate. Help. Let´s be the answer to other´s prayers. Do it. I want to hear your experiences with it.
Also- using our time wisely isn´t just a missionary thing. It´s something for all of us. I encourage you all to see if there´s something that isn´t the best use of your time and find something useful to replace that with. There´s so much to be done in this world, so many people that need help and if we are occupied with things that don´t really matter, we´ll miss some of the sweetest moments life has to offer. I´ve seen that so often since I´ve been here. I hope you can all experience that too.
I love you! Stay awesome!
Love, Sister Niebergall
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