Elder Müller in the Belgium/Netherlands Mission: Week 7: My First Full Week as a Missionary in the Field!!!

Hello all!

This is going to be a short email, because I only have 13 minutes before this library closes, and it's not an American keyboard, so pardon my typing mistakes!

So Brugge is awesome, and Elder Childs is awesome. He has his quirks (so do I) but we get along.

I went on two exchanges this week. They were both an adventure. (Exchanges are when Elders switch companions with another set of Elders. They will do an overnight exchange, or maybe just a day exchange. It helps them to learn other ways of teaching, etc.)

The first one was with the ZL's (Zone Leaders...two Elders who are responsible for many different Elders and Sisters) and I had no idea where any of the places were that we were planning on going to visit. It was still fun though. We managed to find everything. The only thing that wasn't cool was my camera was lost/stolen. I will have to buy a new one. So no pics this week :'( I had it in my bag all day but when we got home, it was gone.

The next day we were supposed to exchange back, so we waited at the bus stop for 20 minutes with no buses. Our phone was locked out so we couldn't call anyone either. Turns out there was a huge strike so only a few buses were running. We eventually got to the station though so it turned out good. (People were striking due to austerity measures the new Belgian government is implementing, so of course, it affected public transporation!)

The second exchange was with the District Leaders, and I taught my first lesson in Dutch!! (District Leaders are two Elders who are responsible for certain Elders and Sisters in their district area.) It was to this cool lady named Martine. We taught the Restoration and talked about acting on answers to prayers. She is our only progressing investigator right now.

We had zone P-Day today, so we went to Antwerpen to play sports with the zone. (P-day is every Monday. This is the day the missionaries get to email home and write letters, do grocery shopping, their laundry and clean their apartments...and make time for some fun!) We are sleeping over in Gent tonight because we don't have enough money to take the train to district meeting tomorrow which is in Gent. It's also a holiday tomorrow (Veteran's Day) so we are going to Ypres. That should be cool. We're going to go see the World War I sites with some members and less actives (Less actives are members of the Church but may not be coming to church for various reasons.)

EDIT: So just as I was about to send this the computer shut down, so yeah. I now have an English keyboard so it should be a bit easier :) Still has to be quick though.

So Brugge is awesome. We have a really small branch, but we've been working hard to help it grow. We have some really cool investigators that are really interested. We are also working with some less actives to try to help them come back.

Something cool happened. There is a film student going to school in Brussels, but lives here in Brugge. He is studying Documentary Film Making and is thinking about making a documentary about our branch for school. He's still working on his idea, and we still need to talk to the church leaders, but it could be a good way to help the missionary work here.

Elder Childs says hi. He is soooooooooooo awesome. Best trainer ever. He's super funny, but drops super awesome quotes all the time. I've started a quote book that I'm going to write quotes from all my companions in. Should be pretty cool.

Anyway, I don't have much time, so till next week!

Elder Muller

(Since Bryan didn't have any pictures to share with this letter, I am going to include some from his last letter that haven't been posted yet.)