Little flea market in schwamendingen. Greifensee John the Baptist baptizing Christ

MAY 7, 2009 THURSDAY

Today we awoke to a beautiful day and began our normal routine. About 10:00 we got a call from Elder Ehlen wanting to know if we had found him something good for Mother’s Day. We had found a website and read him a few of the poems/stories, but he didn’t seem to like any of them. He said he’s be in our area about 2:15 and asked if they could come over and see if he could find something better. We changed our plans, got ready and left for Volketswil to see if we could track down a couple of members, Patricia Hungerbuehler and Rene’ Hartmann. We found both places, but neither were home, so we left notes in their mailboxes asking them to call us to make an appointment to come meet them. We also invited them to come to Church on Mother’s Day. We’ve not heard from either one. We don’t have the phone number for one and the other hasn’t answered our calls either. We also verified that James Vedani had actually moved. On the was back to the bus stop Diana, very alertly, noticed the name, cell phone number and website of one of our less-actives on a car sign strapped to the top of a car. It was a car advertising a driving school. We know where he lives, but his wife is not very friendly and will never let us in. We thought if we could contact him away from his home, we would have a better chance of meeting with him. But alas, it was a different Sandro Costa; what a disappointment.

On the way home we had a few minutes in Schwamendingen so we visited COOP and bought some bananas, strawberries, hamburger, ice cream and yogurt. We made it home by 2:15 and Elders Ehlen and Roberts came shortly thereafter. They spent quite a bit of time on the computer, but finally found a story they liked. Diana always uses the opportunity when we’re in the company of missionaries to help her with her German. We also spent some time talking about different experiences and aspects of missionary work, updated each other on members we know and are currently working with and ways we can support one another. They are working with a family, Rodriques, who is moving to our ward at the end of the month. They asked us if we’d continue working with them when they got here. We offered to help the family with their move and in that way we would be able to get to know them. They thought that would be a good idea and would let us know when the move was actually going to take place. Suwang called right while we were talking about her circumstances and said she had rented her current apartment and her move to her new one was going to be May 14th. We took turns talking to her because she likes to talk and she jabbers a mile a minute. It got to be 5:30 so Diana offered to fix the Elders dinner if they were so inclined. Elder Ehlen was more so than Elder Roberts. While we were having dinner, we got a call from Cornelia who informed us she’d had an accident where she fell and sprained her ankle and twisted her knee; no broken bones. We asked her if we could help her in any way, but she said she was fine, but needed to ask us a question. She wanted to know if there was room in the Church parking lot for her to drive to Church next Sunday. She’s close enough that she’s been walking. We told her, of course, there was room for her to park her car. It’s exciting for us to see that she’s committed to activity in the church even when she has an excuse not to come. She has been to every meeting and even extra activities ever since we contacted her over a month ago.

Diana fixed one of her specialties, mushroom soup and Mexican beans over rice. It’s a meal that’s really delicious and doesn’t take long to prepare. After the meal we offered them vanilla ice cream topped with fresh strawberries, but Elder Roberts declined saying he was still full from lunch at Neide’s. Elder Ehlen didn’t speak up so he didn’t get any either. While they were here, we had Elder Ehlen see why our computer backup to the external hard drive had quit working. He fiddled with it for awhile, changed a few of the plug ins and had it working again in no time. By the time they left it was too late for us to go out to do more contacting so Diana caught up on her scripture and language study while I updated the member log and emailed it to bishop Schwendener and wrote our journal entry. We also tried making some telephone contacts to no avail.