Thanksgiving

 

This photo was taken just outside our apartment about two weeks ago.

Today Liz and I went for a nice, long walk (6,300 steps) after Zoom church.  The fall leaves are still hanging on, but won't be here much longer.

We had been hoping to give the young missionaries in Slovenia a nice Thanksgiving meal and gathering.  The Mission President authorized 7.5 hours for the celebration (including travel time) and we had a plan to get us all together.  However, with increased COVID isolation that was impossible.  We used Zoom to contact them all, but no face-to-face contact at all.  I set up my computer with Zoom tuned in and sent a message to the missionaries that we were very happy to share part of the day with them up until 6:30 pm.  We visited with several of them, and had two companionships online with us as we all ate our separate meals.  That was nice.

That evening we had our kids call in and we actually had all 6 of them online for quite a long time.  Pure heaven!  We were on Zoom from 12:30 until past 10:00 pm, and loved it.

President Russell M. Nelson gave a Thanksgiving fireside chat where he invited everybody to post something every day for a week on social networks telling things for which we are thankful, and use the hashtag #givethanks.   It was fun posting every day, and easy to find good things for which I am thankful.  The Worldwide response has been terrific, and I got lots of likes and responses to my posts.

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One of our duties as Assistant Area Auditors is to train all the leaders in the mission.  I have prepared a training course over the past couple months.   As I completed it, it occurred to me that we have not done anything for the local leadership - only the young missionaries who serve in leadership roles.  (We are down to one young elder who serves as a branch president, but we continue to have quite a few who are branch clerks or assistant clerks.)  I did a quick review and my training course is appropriate for all of them, so I sent invitations to District Presidents and clerks, as well as all the branch ones.  I also included the Mission President and the Area Auditors to whom we report.

  I have set 7 times when anyone who wants training can tune into my Zoom account and get the one-hour presentation.  Included are how to find further resources they can use for self-training.  I addressed things that frequently come out during audits, and how to fix them.  And I explained how to use each screen in the finance systems of the church.

  Yesterday, I had one district clerk who tuned in, and 3 young elders.  Other sessions will be at varying times over the next five days.  It will be interesting to see if any of the District leaders join us.

I am also going to put the presentation on a shared drive where missionaries can reference it at any time.  In preparation for that, I am going to modify it again, and convert it into a PDF format.

The next round of audits starts next month, so here we go again.

Facebook

 I haven't talked about this while posting on this BLOG, but missionary work has changed because we are not allowed to talk to people on the streets like missionaries used to do.  It is against COVID-19 restrictions.  So, we have switched to using Facebook as our missionary contacting tool.  As senior missionaries, it is not our job to find people to teach any more than any other member of the church, but the young missionaries ARE tasked with finding people.  In our new, isolated World, they spend their days posting on Facebook about things that they enjoy.  When people respond to their posts, they make friends, and when their new friends ask about why they are here in a foreign land, they explain about their calling as missionaries and this leads to gospel discussions.  It is less intrusive than stopping people on the streets, and we have found it to be much, much more effective.  In this time of massive unemployment and forced isolation, people are online more and are open to exploring things.  Elder Uchtdorf instructed us to be "normal and natural" in this work, and as we make friends.  He feels that we will never go back to the kind of tracting and street-contacting we used to do.  

   At the start of it, one companionship of young missionaries were tasked with creating a Facebook page for the Adriatic North Mission, with content about the gospel and the church.  Then, there was a page for each of the five countries in the mission, and finally a page for each major city in each country.  While we've been narrowing our focus to the cities, we have also found quite a few people who are outside our boundaries, because Facebook doesn't recognize or work with boundaries.  Our missionaries are teaching people all over the World, even while trying to find people here.  Today, the Mission President announced that we are going to be spreading out our view into the rural areas, so that we are not just focusing on the cities.

   We are using Zoom and WhatsApp video for teaching in a lot of cases, although face-to-face teaching is still best and we do it when we can.  In the beginning of using Facebook, it was assumed that the young missionaries would be technologically savvy and able to do the work in novel ways.  That was mostly correct, but some of them were like me - techie, but not a fan of Facebook.  They worked at it and have gotten better and better.  More recently, the Area has assigned a Facebook expert and a marketing expert to give us weekly lessons on how to be effective missionaries and use Facebook even better.  Their presentations have been fascinating.  This doesn't affect what we are teaching or how we make connections with people, but it seriously affects how good we are at making our initial contacts with them.  More people are being taught than we even dreamed of before we turned to Facebook.

    There are other social networking tools that we could be using, but we have focused on Facebook  so that we can all learn together and can help each other.  In the future, we may use the other programs, but meanwhile the missionaries have become so good with it they are teaching about as many people as they possibly can.  One of our current worries is that we are making so many new contacts that we might loose track of some of them that are already interested in learning more about the gospel.

   We love the missionaries assigned to work with us here.  They are wonderful, and inventive, and interesting, and enthusiastic.  What a marvelous thing we have been allowed to do by coming here to SLOVENIA.

Out walking

 Well, we are restricted, but not imprisoned, so we try to get out and take a nice walk around town every day or so.   Yesterday there was a high wind alert, so we stayed inside like good little doo-bees.  The wind didn't blow, though.  Today it is a bit windy, but we were bundled up.  Tonight will be the first freeze of the year - low of 28 predicted.  Tomorrow night is supposed to be 21, but I suspect this is kind of what winters will be here.  Highs chilly, lows hovering around freezing.  It snows, but I haven't seen any photos of significant amounts.  Mostly, it rains.

    So, I took some cellphone photos.  First, a door.  There are tons of interesting doors around here.  

This an ordinary building, but it dates back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire days.  Very interesting.

This four-pool fountain is in a popular square just outside the palace.  Behind it you can see windows through the city wall.  There is a closer view below.

This dates back even farther than the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The Turks tried to invade Europe starting in about the 1100's or so.  The Yugoslavian countries mostly stopped them.  Maribor was a major crossing point of the Drava River, and so the City of Maribor was built as a fortress.  This is a part of the Palace.  It was built as part of the Old City Wall, and is just about the only piece of it left.  There are some older walls along the riverbank that might also be parts of it..  From the different-colored stone, I expect this was the back gate at one time.  But the window is clearly defensive and gives a hint of the 4-5 feet thick walls.

These are old windows from the courtyard into the cellar of the palace, and even they are defensive, because the palace doubled as the reboubt, or last place of defense.  But these windows were inside the walls.  The low, grey wall bottom-left in this photo is the where the main wall continued across town.

This is the well in the same courtyard.  It's hard to see, but the pulley for lifting buckets out of the well is still there.

I took this photo just to show how the outside walls of the fortress sloped.  Difficult for troops to climb.  It was never conquered while the big artillery was trebuches and fighting was almost all done with bows and swords.  Of course, once big cannons were built, this kind of fortress became obsolete.

Here is a Christmas display in the window of a shop in the Center of Maribor.  Pretty up-scale stuff, but the shop is closed by COVID restrictions.  We still think (and the shop owner clearly agrees) that the intent of government is to clamp down hard now so they can loosen it as Christmas approaches.

This is an Advent tree, for counting down the days until Christmas.  Advent calendars in various forms are very popular here.  In this one, each day you open a drawer and take out a little ornament to hang on the hooks on the ceramic tree.  Very clever.

Fabulous images

 Sometimes you see an image that just makes you smile.  Case in Point:

It is one of a series of posters on a shop in downtown Maribor.  The heading translates (more or less) to "Sunshine World".  I have no clue why they are so prominently displayed.  They are about 5 feet square, thus hard to miss.

  Here are the rest of them:

     And if you are not happy by now, then there is something terribly wrong.  Go see a doctor straight away!   My very favorite is the Pepper Girl who looks like she is about to start giggling, and my least favorite is Coffee Girl who looks a little nervous.

     We need this comic relief.  Slovenia is shutting down for at least two weeks.  We've had a lot of restrictions for a while, but now they are getting very serious about it.  COVID cases are climbing rapidly and they want to put a damper on it so they can relax it a little in time for Christmas (or so we think).

    So, now the restrictions are NO groups of any size, except for those who live in the same household.  No visitors in your house.  No being outside your house without a mask - which is even required while in your car.  No travel outside your home city.  If you have more than one house you can be in whichever one you want, but you can't move between them.  Strict curfew starting at 9:00 each evening and continuing until 6:00 in the morning, with significant fines for violations.

    Some businesses are allowed to remain open.  Grocery stores, bakeries, pharmacies, hospitals and doctor offices, bicycle and car repair places, etc.  Churches are not on that list.

     We had been having the young sister missionaries over to our apartment for Sunday Dinner, and a few weeks ago, we also had a select few members who live nearby join us, too.  First the members had to stay away, and now we can't even have other missionaries.  Of course, we could probably get away with it, but we are trying to set a good example and be supportive of the government.  Today, we arranged to quickly meet the sisters outside and exchange some dinner dishes, so that we all have a nice meal, for half the work of it.  I made my World-famous chocolate chip cookies.  The sisters made lasagna.

     Liz is working on a newsletter for members of the church in our branch area.   We can't meet, and haven't been able to for many weeks.  This is kind of devastating for a small, weak branch like ours.  We need the social interaction and mutual support, but we can't get it.  The hope is that the newsletter will be a small ray of sunshine (like the poster girl above).  It has a short message from the branch President.  It has links to Zoom church meetings, including Sunday meeting, Sunday School lessons, Young Single Adult group, Primary Zoom call, etc.  And much more.

    We have an able young man who is doing the translation of it into Slovene, and I am maintaining the mailing list.  We have high hopes.

Yes.  Faith, hope, and charity.  That is the ticket.

Amazing gadget

 We made an appointment at a medical clinic a few days ago to get blood work done in lieu of an annual physical.   When we walked in the door, the attendants motioned for us to disinfect our hands at a stand by the wall with an alcohol-based cleanser, as is very common here.  As I used it, I was surprised to hear a voice say, "Temperature Normal." in English.  The voice was coming from a non-descript box mounted on the wall right by where your head is when you use the disinfectant.  I might have mentioned this before, but I keep thinking about that gadget on the wall.

   What an amazing gadget it is!!!  Unobtrusive, non-invasive, automatic, pleasant, and terribly effective.   I love that.

I just heard the Secretary of State in the U.S. say that there will be a smooth transition to a 2nd Trump administration, even though the result of the election is clearly a defeat for him.  It has been clear for a couple of days, but Trump is incapable of admitting defeat.  I have to admit that he makes me ashamed to be an American.  This isn't why I served in the USMC.  Coverage of gangs of Trump supporters carrying rifles makes me even more ashamed.  People here tend to like Trump because he married a local woman, but they talk about him like a crazy uncle.  Nobody around here thinks he should be President anymore.  I agree.

This is another photo of the lights put out at the cemetery on the Day of the Dead.  

Visiting Ljubljana and the Maribor Cemetery

 Yesterday, we had an appointment with the national police in Ljubljana to get fingerprinted - the last step in getting our official visa to be here in Slovenia.  The wheels of government have been turning especially slowly during the pandemic shut down.  Along with the appointment, we got official permission to travel for one day, which would ordinarily ("ordinary" during the shutdown) be prohibited.

  We have young missionaries in Ljubljana and Celje, and it is one of our duties to inspect their apartments regularly.  So we took advantage of our travel permission to do that, and while we were with the sisters in Ljubljana we had a birthday party for one of them.  Liz had prepared a wonderful cake, streamers, candles, presents, balloons, etc. so it was fun.  The apartments were in good shape and quite clean, but we are learning, too, and we discovered how to solve the ubiquitous problem of the refrigerators accumulating condensation water.  The drain tubes get stopped up with gunk of various sorts, and then the water flows down to the bottom drawer.  We simply poked the top of the tube and freed it up.

   We also pulled out the grease filters from stove hoods and encouraged all of them to put those in the dishwasher to get them renewed.

    It was a fairly long day for two old people, but we had promised to take the Maribor Sisters to the cemetery to see the lights, so we did that after we got back.

It was dark, but the moon was full, and there were lights everywhere.  Perfect Halloween weather, even if it was a day or two late.  We were absolutely stunned at how many graves had fresh flowers.  Mounds of them!  And so many lights.

This is the view down one of the rows.  This cemetery is huge, probably 300 acres or so, and there were lights on the graves all over it.  Photography doesn't catch the vista of  the small lights stretching off into the distance.  We walked along looking at them and just didn't want to leave.

The history of this cemetery is interesting.  Maribor is a medieval city and over the years it had several cemeteries.  By the 1800's, the many had been combined into a Catholic cemetery, a protestant cemetery and a non-affiliated with an attached section for suicides and criminals.  Around the turn of the twentieth century, the property was full, so they moved all the graves to the current location, and built a soccer field on the property (now the home of the National Team of Maribor) where the old one was.  It is still divided, but only into two: Catholic and non-Catholic.  They are about the same size: huge.  And they are about full, so there is another section just being completed.  I don't know if it will be sectioned off - people here aren't as divided over religion as they used to be.

  We came to one that was very interesting.  Sadly, I didn't get a photograph of it, but it is for Catholic nuns.  It took up the space of three normal graves and an immense headstone had three sections.  In the middle were the names of about a dozen M.M. nuns (Mothers Superior?).  Then, on each side was a sign with a single line for each of the S.M. nuns (I assume ordinary nuns).  The most interesting thing was the dates.  They only had the death year, but at the top there were a couple of names per year, varying of course.  As it went down to later years there were fewer and fewer, until now they are 5-10 years apart.  This, of course, reflects declining interest and power of the Catholic Church with declining numbers of nuns.  In Slovenia today, there just isn't much interest in religion.  We are trying to change that.

The television is on

 Here is an oddity.   This is a patch of European thistles.  The bees love them.  But the bees do not love them equally.  Notice that one thistle has several bees on it, while the others are untouched.  Why would that be?  There are few things so un-picky as a bee.  If it has pollen, they will come.

We have been in the Adriatic North Mission since February.  That entire time we have lived in apartments that have television service and internet service bundled together by a single provider.  In that entire time we have not watched television.  We haven't felt any need for it, and we haven't missed it.  We usually pull the HDMI cable out of the TV port on the router and plug into a laptop so we can use Zoom, or whatever else is on there that we need.   Tonight, I hooked the TV up and got it tuned to CNN.  

    Tomorrow, we are going to Ljubljana to the police station for the final task of getting a one year visa.  We have a full day of apartment inspections and birthday celebrations to do, as well.  When we get back, the voting stations in the states will be in full swing, but we won't have any good idea of what happens on election day until at least Wednesday.  If nothing else, this election has been exciting.

Yesterday was Halloween.  In Slovenia, it is a Day of the Dead (like Dia de La Muerte), where families get together at gravesites and decorate the stones.  Keep in mind that the typical family here has a gravesite with a crypt that may hold a dozen or more caskets.  They honor their dead, and the stones are regularly washed, swept, fresh flowers left, and luminaria (a Luna in Slovene) lit.  On this day, there is also a tradition of leaving a Luna in front of the statue of Jesus in the cemetery.  Today there is a small field holding thousands of lunas in the big Maribor cemetery.  Some hold candles, and some are battery
powered, but they will be left undisturbed until the last one has flickered its last.  Sadly, COVID has the numbers of celebrants down, but some traditions cannot be repressed.

This is Sister Johansen last night, standing by a grave with the crypt stone covered by fresh flowers and lunas.

And this is the statue of Jesus with lunas honoring him.  This was at a cemetery in Zagreb and the two photos above were taken by Elder Johansen.

Yesterday was also an official holiday - Reformation Day.   It is in honor of the Protestant Reformation of the Catholic Church.

  The stores are prepared for the celebration, and here is a photo of the lunas.

The permanent shelf, and pallets of extras in front.  They look a bit like canning jars, but these are luna, intended for graveside honoraria.  They all have handles so they can be hung or tied down.  The grocery stores always have these available, but this week they had lots, and lots, and lots of them, and quite a few left over.  They cost about 5-6 Euros apiece for the battery powered ones - less for the candles which are subject to being distinguished by a gust of wind.