Another Sunday:
Where do the weeks go? We are happy that Nelise’s surgery is over and she is in recovery mode. We were able to “see” her a few times on FaceTime. The marvels of technology still amaze me. I remember when we lived in Egypt that we had to stand in line for a phone if we wanted to make a long-distant phone call. When my father was ill, an embassy friend invited me to her villa to use her phone. Mail would take 2-3 weeks. But alas, I digress. You probably aren’t looking at the blog to read my reminiscences from Egypt, though I could write a few.
I am amazed at how many dominos we see here. I used to set up dominoes so they would fall in a long line. I don’t even try to set up dominoes here, but for every action there is a reaction. We live in a place of constant moving pieces. The only thing I can count on for sure is that our ceiling leaks when it rains, and bread is cheap.
We invited an Iranian couple to dinner at our apartment last night. A couple of weeks ago we took them to dinner, and last week they invited us to their apartment for “cake and tea”. So the ball was in our court again. They have only been in Turkey for one month. They have an interesting story as does everyone who flees/leaves Iran. But I won’t write about that.
They are vegans. I probably wrote about that earlier. It was not hard to feed them because we don’t eat a lot of meat anyway. I prepared a lentil soup that I really like, had some veggies, some cheap bread, olives, and I made a fresh fruit cup for dessert. I usually butter bread and toast it for dinners, but this time I put some spices and olive oil on the bread and toasted it. It tasted very good, I thought. They were very appreciative of “my” cooking, but it was actually quite simple for me. In the US we usually have to base our meal around a meat. With them I only had to omit butter from the meal. I looked for some Fresca for the fruit cup, but had to settle for Sprite.
As I mentioned earlier they are vegans out of respect for animals, not “just” for health.
We had a good conversation and gave them a Farsi Book of Mormon that they said they were excited to read. They also came to church today. So we don’t know where this will lead. We like them as a couple. They speak English well enough that we can communicate. They are probably in their mid-twenties.
Church was interesting today: Fast and Testimony Sunday. We had 10 (2 elders, 1 Mongolian woman, 2 Turks, 2 Iranians, 1 Tasmanian, and dad and me) people in the room, and about 12 on Skype. We heard testimonies from 3 of the Skype listeners: a German woman, an Iranian convert, and a Turkish Convert. We had a huge mix of people. Our guests from last night were able to translate the Iranian convert’s testimony. FYI: Iranians speak Farsi, which uses the Arabic script.
Those who were connected by Skype all live 2-10 hours away.
We leave tomorrow morning for Kiev, Ukraine. We have to leave our apartment by 4:00 AM, so it will be a loooooong day. We will get trained in Church History by a man from SLC. He is supposed to be bringing me a computer to borrow. I’m excited to see Kiev, but I doubt we’ll have time to explore. We return Wednesday morning.
I hope you are all doing well!
Love,
Mother
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