"A good Day!!" Nori's quote just a few minutes ago. It is after all Super Bowl Sunday

This for your information is the best functioning Young Women's Program
These young women have the only true YW leader.
New Beginnings Ankara

Dünya üzerindeki bütün insanlar için Tanrı’ya minnettarım. Onların hepsi Tanrı’nın çocukları ve benim de kardeşlerim.

(I am grateful for the good people of the world. They are God’s children and my brothers and sisters).

 

Nastran, Veheda, Nafas
The sisters of Persia

Today was a really interesting day.  The first Persian sister that we taught bore her testimony and talked about how we have changed her life.  The Persians are so amazing in the way they describe the world and what happens in the world.  It is almost poetry when they describe the significance of baptism and coming up out of the “womb of the world into the light of Christ”.  She talked about a dream she had some years ago and how that dream was her baptism and she did not know about it until after the baptism.  She said she had been dressed in white with a man in white and he held her hand.  She then said it was Elder Weaver who held her and blessed her life.  That is a little over the top, but a very nice compliment.

 

Nastran and Amir
The couple from my blog "A Persian Love Story"

On Saturday the final two members of my Farsi to English class will be baptized.  Reza and Nafas will bring the new Persian numbers up to a total of 10 living in Ankara and waiting to move to the states.  4 of these are the new baptisms from my class.  Now we have a Farsi Sunday school class and we are interpreting priesthood into Farsi.  This may be a Turkish mission, but our success is with the Iranians.  It is amazing.  I am convinced that if we had the resources, the potential with the Iranians is unlimited.  We have two more investigating and of course we still have those members in remote cities waiting for their visa/ green card interviews.  We Skype with Javad in Denisli for Sunday school and priesthood every week and we have 4 other members in two outlying cities.  Total Iranians in the Branch is now 15.  Unfortunately they will all move and leave the Branch, but we have only a total of 5 Turkish members.

I am thinking we are serving an Iranian mission.

Some times some good old indoor-outdoor
carpet is much better than asphalt or cement.

We are anxious to go home, but we will miss the amazing people from other lands.  The high levels of American ex-pats are just regular old members so even though they are good people, they are not unique and are just traditional Utah based members.

A new couple from the states will be arriving in Istanbul this week as the replacement couple for the Bauers.  The Bauers have also extended by 6 months, so there will be two couples in Istanbul for a few months.  I have no clue as to what they will do, but we hope it is a good mission for them.  They are Member Leader Support Missionaries so their work will be with the branch.

A gathering of volunteers.  In other parts of the world this would be a Zine Conference.
Nori will hate this, but I had no other.  She is just sitting down.
Names withheld to prevent an investigation.
Somewhere in the middle east.

 We are down to single digit weeks now.  Just 9 weeks and we will have completed our assignment, but who is counting?

Nori's New Beginnings refreshment table.

I want to share one of my family memory.

Reza's English Writing Assignment for my English Class.

"Tell me a story from your life."

We traveled to Dubai to see our brother and his family after 22 years.

I saw his children for the first time.  I was so excited and happy to see them.  We had been there for 15 days.  I couldn’t talk with his children because I didn’t know English and they didn’t know Farsi too.

But I heard very beautiful words from my son’s brother.

He told his dad:

I understand that people talk with  each other by their heart because I can understand what uncle told me even if I don’t know his language.