This has probably been one of the craziest weeks ever! But guess what everyone?! There is finally SNOW in FINLAND!!! I never thought that I would have to wait until the middle of January for it to finally snow and to not have the white Christmas that we usually have. I mean we were walking around in short sleeves and no jackets on Christmas day! That has kinda been what the weather has been like lately here, but maybe not quite so warm, until just this past weekend! It was crazy how fast the temperature dropped. It went from being kinda cold to down right freezing within a day! I am about to experience the Finnish winter! And I have talked to Finns about how cold it is here and they say it gets even colder so hopefully I don't die!
Mission Fast
Well last week we had our mission leadership council meeting where we decided that we would to the mission fast that we are all really excited about! Each district throughout Finland will get a week to fast for their area and the mission as a whole, so each companion will fast one day and the entire fast will last about 11 weeks! We were all really excited about it and got to present in zone meeting this week. So we met with the elders and planned the zone meeting which actually went really well! I still have to admit that I don't like having to sit up front in these meetings with the zone leaders and Sister Fronk, haha. I am the companion tag along who gets to sit through all the long meetings because my companion is sister training leader. :) Plus, I get to enjoy all of the awkward eye contact moments that you make when sitting up front! But at zone meeting we discovered that our district would be starting off the fast because most of the leaders are in our district and so President had us set up a last minute district meeting! That was rough because there are people who have to take a train for an hour to get to us and others who have to drive 45 minutes. But we managed to pull it off and then found out that they had decided to switch and have a different district go first. It was the craziest few days full of meetings that I have ever had!
Making Chinese Chicken in a Very Small Kitchen!
I also got to go on splits this week but instead of going somewhere else both of the sisters came to our area! So I got to be the leader in what we were doing and everything! I have to admit that I actually quite enjoyed it! It was a ton of fun at one of our lessons! Hai invited us over because our lesson fell through again and we had a member with us and Hai needed to show us how to make some chicken for the Spring Festival that we were having at the end of the week. But the crazy part was that Hai has this really small kitchen and there were 4 of us there trying to learn how to make the chicken, when our investigator who is his roommate decided that he would come out too! And I am the only one who knows both of them and the member! So I was trying to talk to all of them and learn how to make chicken. Meanwhile we were all squished in this tiny kitchen! It was crazy! Luckily, my companion for the day was helping a lot and we would just switch places and take turns talking to different people and practically running around the kitchen! It was crazy but so much fun!!
I Love Chinese People!
After that we got to go and visit Yan an Lin again this week except only the Yan, the wife, was home this time! She is the cutest, sweetest person that I have ever met in my life! I love Chinese people! She doesn't speak English super fluently but every time we come over her English just gets better and better! We are also going to help her with learning English and we are really excited about that! She always gets super excited when we come over because she doesn't have a job or school or anything and her husband works all day, so she spends most of her days at home or shopping. We got to teach her a lesson on prayer and talk to her about her baptism this past year which was really amazing! Plus, she made us dumplings! They were SO good! She is really just the cutest and sweetest person and we are just really trying to get them both back to church every week :)
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| Picture is of our little Chinese group that helped make the food for the Spring Festival!! (With some Americans, Filipinos, and Vietnamese add ins) :) |
Spring Festival Celebration
Well this week we had our Spring Festival! So we have a lot of Chinese and Vietnamese people in our ward, so we decided that we were going to do a Spring Festival this year, but we had to do it early because a lot of people were flying home for their own spring festival. So we got it all put together and invited anyone and everyone we could that lived in Helsinki, Maranjemi, and Espoo! We actually weren't expecting a huge success but to our surprise we had about 70 people come and most of them weren't even members! Plus, we had a Book of Mormon table with all of the different languages and people were taking them and we were able to talk to them about it. It was really cool! We also had an investigator come, one of the 18 year old Finnish girls, Anna! She is so cute and it was so perfect because she is actually friends with a member and with an investigator who came that has been investigating for awhile! It was awesome because that investigator just started teaching her everything and at the end of the day we were able to invite her to church and she came! It was amazing and the party was a HUGE success for almost everyone!
Sister Appendicitis
We also had an exciting last couple of days as one of the sisters, Sister West, had to be rushed to the hospital at 3:00 in the morning by the zone leaders! Those poor elders didn't get any sleep and we had no idea about it until the next morning! Apparently she had appendicitis and so we got to go and visit her in the hospital and she had surgery last night! Crazy! The hospital doesn't allow people to be with her after 6:00 pm so we had three at our apartment for a night, which was kinda fun! But we are really hoping that she gets out of the hospital today! This week was crazy but we saw so many blessings this week with our investigators and it was amazing! The Lord helps us out even with things don't go as smoothly as planned!
Thanks for all the love and support!
Love,
Sister Knapp
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