These are photos of the Rheinfall we took last fall on one of our P-days. We need to get some winter photos.

JANUARY 31, 2010 SATURDAY

Today there were many things on our plate that we absolutely had to get done in preparation for an appointment with Kofi Safo-Adu this evening and for tomorrow. We had to polish our talks and practice for sacrament meeting and then write our progress report. We also needed to do some research and locate some scriptures for Brother Hoenli to help him understand that God is omniscient, the he possesses all knowledge and is not still learning. However, first we had to go to the store to get some veggies for Diana to help her with her commitment with Sylvain Gardedieu. I walked to ALDI and I was looking for a close bus stop so Diana would be able to come with me next time and I noticed the underground entrance to a train stop. I went over and took a look and saw the train schedule posted, but I couldn’t find the name of the station anywhere. I noticed a lady standing not too far away with her dog so I went over and asked her. She was very helpful and in return I offered her a Book of Mormon which she accepted. I continued on to ALDI, made the purchases and walked back home.

We looked on the internet to find some helps for the English reading class we were going to have with Kofi tonight and found a helpful site about Phonics. When we printed the phonics rules out, Dennis Doyle’s name appeared at the end as the creator of the site. How’s that for a coincidence. Dennis and Mary Kaye are presently serving in the Switzerland Geneva Mission and he is helping us, without his knowing it, with what we are doing here.

Giving talks for both of us is not an easy thing to do, especially in the German language. We both worked on them most of the day, but we got some other things accomplished, too. Our landlord has been bugging us to come visit him and today we thought would be a good time to do it. He wanted us to come watch a skiing competition of TV with him. We’d invited him to come to Church Sunday so we thought we would reciprocate and do something with him in hopes he’ll come tomorrow. We watched TV with him about an hour and then we left. He said we could come watch his TV anytime they weren’t home, just walk in and sit down. Neither they nor we lock our apartment doors because the outside building door is always locked and we are the only ones who live here.

We made some phone calls today to Silvana Gianatti, Sylvain Gardedieu and Walter Burri. We called Silvana just to let her know we were thinking about her and to remind her about our agreement that she would come to General Conference in April. She was happy to hear from us, but said she just didn’t feel ready to attend the conference. That was disappointing, but we still have time to work on her. We made a lunch appointment on April 10 to celebrate Diana’s birthday. Walter Burri didn’t answer his phone, so we’ll try calling him tomorrow. Sylvain didn’t answer his phone either so Diana left a message of encouragement for him to listen to. Charlotte called us and invited us to come on Monday P-day to have lunch with the other missionaries and to celebrate hers and my birthday, even though hers was on January 27 and mine is on February 2. So for my birthday I get to do at least four haircuts of missionaries who will be there to help celebrate with us.

We called Kofi to see if he was still coming to the English reading class and at the same time try to convince him to come to our home instead of the Church. He didn’t want to come here so we agreed to meet him at the Church at 5:30, which we did. He said he only wanted to spend a half hour with us, but we ended up spending two hours instead. He has what seems to us to be a third grade reading level, can sound most words out, but reads really slow. He knows what most words mean, but needs a dictionary to help him with definitions. We offered to get him a dictionary to help him. We gave him a copy of the printed out phonics rules and went over them with him. He’s going to need some time to digest this information, but we’re sure it will help him with his reading. By the time we were finished it was way after dark and very cold. The road down from the Church to the bahnhof was snow-covered and icy, but we made it without too much trouble. Saturday evenings our bus only runs every twenty minutes and we just missed it. However, all good things come to and end and we finally made it home.

We spent the rest of the evening still working on our talks and writing our progress report. And finally went to bed at 11:30, which was too late to write our journal.

A tender mercy was that Kofi offered Diana his arm to hold onto walking down the steep road from the Church and as soon as I had locked the door, she had me on the other side. With both of us it helped her feel more secure about not slipping.