Gift of Throats and Hello Elder Davison!

Service project - making lunch in a garden in Den Haag

As the second original joke of my career (I don't actually remember the first), this week I noted that to learn Dutch one needs more than the gift of tongues, you must also receive the gift of throats. This is in light of my slowly and steadily increasing dutch skills. A lot of the things I'm learning about how to speak dutch I wish someone could've just explained to me, but I suppose you understand it better if you figure it out yourself. For example, native dutch speakers produce a lot of their words further toward the back of their throat. The R, G, and Ch in particular are produced from the throat, but in addition most their vowels also need to come from the faculties towards the rear of the mouth in order to sound authentic. It sounds simple enough, but for native speakers of english, the back of the throat I believe is rarely involved. It's something that takes understanding and skill that come from a lot of practice to get right, but as it starts to come together, the ability to speak a foreign language naturally is very rewarding and enjoyable.

Anyways, hopefully that explains "The Gift of Throats." All in all, I would just like to say that I am so grateful for the opportunity to learn a foreign language, it is a pleasure and expands your understanding of language and culture, two beautiful and rewarding areas to explore.

Next, the baptism! Everything went smoothly! Brigette is now a member of the church. She very excited for a trip she's taking to Seattle on Wednesday to visit the people that introduced her to the church merely a couple months ago. She has also planned to visit the Portland temple and visitor's center! 

I had a very good morning, I got right to cleaning and organizing (which always feels really good) and a bit of language study on some folksy dutch music that I found in one of our closets. Then I listened to Grandad's album. I LOVE that music! I found the piano music for "The Lord is My Light" online, I would like to learn it and a couple others. All large stations here have a piano for people to play and I was just thinking this morning what a good way to use my talents it would be if I could play and sing an inspirational song of Grandad's. It would take a lot of courage because it's a very public place with loads of people walking around, but it could really be a good way of brightening someone's day, and who knows, maybe touching them a little bit deeper too. Listening to that album of Grandad singing has given me so much strength. I don't do it often for some reason, but when I do it's very special.

Yesterday, a girl gave her homecoming talk in sacrament meeting. She served in the Alpine Mission which covers a considerable chunk of Germany, most of Switzerland, and Austria. It looks like a cool place to serve. They speak German there, and I was interested to hear from her a bit more of the dialects of German in southern Germany and it's other two mountainous neighbors. There are also quite often a couple more Germans that attend in Den Haag, one who is dating a member here, and another who works in Delft. I love learning about languages, but just with learning to play piano or basketball, real skill comes from systematic practice that isn't as fun as what I would rather do, which is just skim over books that explain the principles and explanations of the workings of a language. I'll learn though! Mercifully, I still have my whole higher schooling ahead of me to take full advantage of with what I've developed from earlier and current experiences with learning.

We had very low numbers this week again, but I am proud of the amount of work we did do. We had a really good first lesson this week with a man who's father is American. He grew up with a step father and his biological mother in the Netherlands, but he speaks both english and dutch. His step mother is a member both he apparently hasn't talked about the church with her much before. He grew up without much religion, he just went to a christian school, which is very common here. When you ask them if they're religious they'll often say that they went to a christian school, but that is about the extent of their formal religious involvement. As a side note, we do meet a good amount of interesting people of faith here. Churches usually don't have a very good name, but most people believe in something, it's just hard to talk to them about it if they know you're from a missionary from an organized church. Anyways, the investigator really wanted to know what our church was about since his step mother is in it and also he visited temple square last december. We had a long discussion as we went through the first lesson, he had a lot of good questions and understood well what we were teaching. He also shared a lot of things about himself and how he sees things based off of his experiences. I've always had a good feeling about him. We covered a lot of points of the lesson. He said that authority stuck out to him and that he is going to read the book of mormon and talk to his step mother about it. He said to begin with that he's not interested in joining anything, but that's understandable. I think the lesson went really well and that he is likely to consider our message quite seriously. We'll probably visit or call him this week. If you would like to pray for him, his name is Dave. I'm learning how dramatic the presence of gospel principles is in everyone's lives. I also am left ponder about why the church is so small, and how there are so many people who try to live good lives and yet are not able to find or accept the gospel. So many have to get along without it, but the Lord provides light for them to follow. I'm so grateful for the gospel in my life. The Lord really does bless us with so much, we just have to do our best. Trusting that the gospel is his plan for us to be happy makes things a lot easier. Doing our best to follow him will always pay off. He loves us no matter how weak we are. He knows every one of us through and through and everything that happens to us in this life is for our good. Our Heavenly Father has so much in store for us in this life and in the next. His son Jesus Christ was appointed before this world as the one to give us the power to go through this life and have it exalt us, not damn us. We knew him and he loves us. He and his Atonement enable us to become more like God, and that is an idea that should make us all very grateful. His character and love are wonderful beyond anything this world has to offer. We can experience positive changes and improvement in our lives through reading in the scriptures and learning about Jesus Christ. He wants us to feel his love even when we feel like we don't deserve it.

We also did a really cool service project at a sort of community garden. We got to talk with a lot of people there, they were good people! It was a pretty impressive garden, it's in the middle of the city and it's meant to bring neighbors together to get to know each other and do fun activities. 

Elder Davison my new companion is really cool. He's from Utah, but was adopted from Kazakstan  when he was seven into a mixed family that grew to 15! He's getting close to his year mark and really likes basketball. He's a funny guy and is a great missionary. We're both excited for this transfer together.

Weather here has been nice and relatively dry. It's still pretty cold and sometimes windy, but better. I remember seeing daffodils for sure, but I don't think many tulips have made it out yet. I learned this week that tulips, like a lot of things in the netherlands, actually come from the east where the dutch have a grand history of trade. 

I just learned today that my second cousin, Sister Winkel, is in Lelystad, which is up near Zwolle, but not in the same zone. To answer Mom's question, we are closer to the office, but I haven't been there since I got here, we never really have a reason to visit. Leiden, where the office is located, a whole city over. 

We looked up the adresses of grandpa's second cousins that were in Den Haag in the eighties. One of the adresses was an apartment accessable from the street (I'll have to send a picture next week to give you a picture of a large portion of the doors we knock in den haag) in a typical huge brick building which was more that likely the same since the eighties. The other was in a different sort of apartment building that was newer which you have to "bel-up" to. There's a board by the door with numbered buttons to call the residents house phone. We do quite a few of those, if they want to let you in they press a button to unlock the door and you walk up a stairwell (I'll have to also send a picture of one of those next week. These two types of housing make up probably around 90% of the housing in the netherlands. There are tons of really giant apartment buildings too. Anyways, we got in contact with the residents of both adresses and neither knew who the Van Ojens where. I'll keep my eyes and ears out for the name though, some Van Ojen relatives may still live here.

So that'll have to be all, I could go on but I haven't the time.

Love, Elder Knaupp