Weekend activities

 We have been in Pittsburgh, actually Bethel Park, for 2 months now.   We have settled in to our responsibilities in the office fairly well though we do hit little speed bumps every once in a while.  We have days when we work steadily until 6pm and then we have days when we leave the office at 2:30.  We have another group of 20 new missionaries coming in Oct 23rd and we have had to open 2 new apartments so we have had some days that we leave the office and head for WalMart or Ikea to pick up household goods and we do not get home until 8pm,  We have also spent a lot of time at thrift stores.  That has been quite fun as we find good deals on furnishings for the apartments.This should be the last time we are furnishing the new apartments.  The number of new missionaries coming in is dropping in the next few months and we should balance our numbers coming and going.

We do not see very many people in the office but we go into Pittsburgh Thursday mornings for District Meeting.  This is our District.  Elder Richens, Elder Herzog, Elder Hansen, Elders Swisher, Elder Gray and Elder Holley.  Elders Herzog and Hansen were transferred to other areas on Oct. 25.  

If we feel so inclined, we can attend the YSA Family Home Evening on Monday.  So far we have felt too busy to add that to the list.

Weekends we have tried to explore our surroundings.  Several weeks ago we drove south to go to the Covered Bridge Festival.  There were about 10 bridges where they had crafts and food.  We went the week before to check out 3 of the bridges and then went back to three more during the festival.  The pictures were from another day.  Picture lots of craft booths and hundreds of people around them.

 Another weekend, we went to the Washington DC temple with the YSA Ward.  Most of the day was rainy but we enjoyed the day anyway.  Along the way we saw some really pretty fall colors.

  

Our route to DC took us right past Frederick MD.  This is where Jonathan and Margo lived after he graduated from Carnegie Mellon, which is here in Pittsburgh..

 

We returned to Frederick after the Temple to go to Cafe Rio.  Hakima introduced me to Snapchat.

 Another day we checked out the Pittsburgh Inclines.  We have discovered that with our Medicare card we get to ride different public transport for free.  We rode the incline and then went to Station Square.  This is an old railroad station that has been turned into shops and restaurants.  

  

One of our new duties is to provide lunch once a month at the Institutes Friday Forum.  Last week the speaker was Steve Shellenberger. He wrote Becoming Your Bestself: The 12 Principles of Highly Successful Leaders.  He was a great motivational speaker.  There were about 35 people in attendance.  This was just the second time they had held a forum and they only expected 25 so it was a good turnout.  One of the things that Bro. Shallenberger gave us was this little saying

Good, better, best

Never let it rest

Till the good is better

And the better is best.

One weekend we also checked out the Apple Festival in Hickory.  The crafts were okay but they were outnumbered by the food booths.  We stood in line for 1 hour to get a couple of loaves of homemade bread. We would not have waited for it but we had committed to bring apple pies and bread to dinner at the Mission Home the next day.  We gathered there to watch General Conference.

 As we drive to and from all our downtown meetings we drive past lots of really interesting homes.  I love the architecture and landscaping here.

 Before we arrived, the old office missionaries had picked out colors for paint and flooring in our office.  We saw the color chip for the paint and voiced our opinion that it was a little too bright but no one else seemed to be concerned.  The picture below shows that the walls are now a yellow but you cannot really tell from it how yellow.  In a room with no windows, we now have a sunny room.

                           
A week ago we had several fun activities.  On a Friday night we rode the train (free with our Medicare cards) in to downtown Pittsburgh. 

 We walked from the train station to a Market Square to have dinner at Moe's.  It is a Chipotle like restaurant but the food is not as good.  We will try something else next time.



We then walked back to the Benedum Center.  This is a beautiful old theater. 

  

The Pittsburgh Opera was performing La Traviata.  I knew nothing about the story line on this.  We went in for the pre-show talk and I realized that this was not such a good performance for a missionary to go to.  I did like the music but there were a few dicey spots in the performance.  Live and learn.

        

The next day we drove to Columbiana Ohio to the Shaker Woods Christmas Festival.  The picture does not really show the number of cars that were there.  There had to be at least a thousand cars.  Just think about how many people that meant were inside the "woods".  It was wall to wall people. 

 

We finished the day off at a wedding reception for Anna and Troy.  They are the cutest couple from the YSA group.  I could never get a picture of just them.  They had friends and family wanting pictures with them the whole evening.  Jill and Stephanie are two other YSA's.

    

 

This past Saturday, we invited the Christensen's to accompany us to the Flight 93 Memorial in Stoysville.  This was another plane that terrorists took over on Sept. 11 2001.  It's intended target was probably the Capitol building in Washington, DC, but the passengers had been able to phone their families and found out about the twin towers and the Pentagon and they ended up trying to attack the hijackers and the plane crashed.  The memorial is really well done and it was a very moving experience.  There is a walking trail you can go on which takes you down to the crash site but it was absolutely freezing that day and we were too cold to do anything more than go through the visitors center.  It was raining but we had another very beautiful drive. 

We ended our Saturday at the YSA Game Night.  They do this about once a month and it is a fun evening. 

This last picture is one that one of our YSA kids posted on the Ward Facebook page.  She had shared it with one of the young men in the Ward and he made mention of it in his talk on Sunday.  He talked about having seen the picture and it made him think of how wonderful it is to just lay back and gaze into the heavens and think about our Father in Heaven and Jesus Christ.  The picture is one of such 

peacefulness and I really like it.

My goal is to start taking more pictures of our missionaries and the activities of the mission.  Hopefully I will be posting more of that in the future but there is also so much more to see here in Pennsylvania so stay tuned for more adventures.

   

  

 

Relocating

Well, it has definitely been a while since we last posted.  We have had any exciting trips that never made it on to here but our last "trip" was 2 weeks in the Provo MTC followed by a week of driving across the United States.  We stopped at several Church history spots here and there and then arrived in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania on August 19th to start a one year mission. 

Tanner Nelson entered the MTC a few days before we finished up.

We saw Addison Lomaxay while were there but this is a picture that

Addison sent me after we left.  It was good that he connected with

Tanner.  Elder Nelson is now in Knoxville TN and Elder Lomaxay

is in Cambodia.

Our first night on the road, we stayed in an old Mansion that

has been renovated and is now a Bed and Breakfast.  It was

a beautiful home.  The town it is in is very small and we had a

hard time finding a place to eat.  Breakfast the next morning

was fabulous though.

We stopped at Martins Cove and had a very warm hike back into

the cove.  I think it was about 2 miles.  I did not like the heat

but I just can't even imagine what the pioneers had to endure

during the winter time.  We saw the Saunders from our Stake.  They

are serving a mission there.

The scenery in Wyoming was not much to look at but we saw coal

mines and a few other interesting things.

Wayne kept saying we needed to stop in Wall South Dakota so

we could see Wall Drug.  There is nothing of a town there

but the "drug store" takes up an entire block.  It was a pretty

amazing place.

We drove through the Badlands.  I just kept thinking of all the

Western movies I have seen and could picture the cowboys

and Indians riding through the canyons.

Mount Rushmore

Custers State Park had some absolutely gorgeous

scenery.  We also saw a lot of animals there -
buffalo, prairie dogs, deer, etc.

We went to Winter Quarters where we shared our
tour with Lloyd Newell and his family, then went
to Liberty Jail and since we were in the area I
had to go see the headquarters for the Community
of Christ Church (Reorganized LDS).

Mississippi River

St. Louis Arch

And then things started looking really good.  Lots of green
and rolling hills.  Cute little farms everywhere.


We have been assigned to work in the mission office.  We headed straight for the office when we arrived in Pittsburgh.  We met the couple we replaced, the Gardners, took them to lunch, they took us to our new apartment and then we headed back to the office.  We started working right away and have been busy,, busy ever since.



President and Sister Johnson came in to the office to meet us that afternoon.  He works out of the Mission Home and we only see him occasionally in the office.  They took us out for breakfast the next morning to Pamelas.  It is supposed to be a pretty well known place.  It was good.

 One of the things that kept us really busy the first few weeks was getting five new apartments ready for when a group of 25 new missionaries arrived.  We only had 9 depart so new areas had to be opened up.  Our mission is so spread out that we rely on the Bishops, Relief Society Presidents and Ward Mission Leaders to help us.  They do the foot work of finding new apartments and then we do all the paperwork and ordering utilities, etc.  Completely furnishing an apartment when it is 3 to
5 hours away is interesting.  We have the move crew though.  These are three elders who load up, drive to the location and then unload everything and set the apartment up.  We have three storage units that were full when we arrived.  They are looking pretty empty now.  We have two apartments we are opening up this next month so we have been picking things up gradually to furnish them.  It isn't just the furniture  that we have to get.  We supply them with lamps, rugs, cleaning supplies, dishes, microwaves, toasters, and on and on.  I have loved shopping without using my money.

The move crew and their trailer.

 We had two General Authorities and their wives visit the second week we were here.  Elders Perkins and Meurs did training with 1/2 the mission in Greentree and then did the other half in State College the next day.  We had some fantastic meetings and then the Senior Missionaries here in Pitt got to go to dinner with the Perkins and Meurs that night.  The Rekief Society sisters fed us well at lunch time.

Pittsburgh and its surrounding areas is absolutely beautiful.  This is a trail that we can get on just behind our apartment.  It used to be the railroad track.  They have made it into a trail which goes about 32 miles.  Beautiful.

Well that covers the first month of our time here.  We have been assigned to work in the Young Single Adult Ward and so we travel a little more than a half hour to get to the church several times a week.  We put 1400 miles on the car in our first month here and I can see it being much more this next month.  We love driving the small winding roads here but rely heavily on GPS.  You cannot tell which direction you are going in and if you make a wrong turn you are lost.  There is lots to do here, when we have the time.  We are really looking forward to all that we will be exposed to.  The missionaries are wonderful and boost us so much.

Nepal - CHOICE Humanitarian Project

On December 4th I (Wayne) left on a two week trip to Nepal via Jinan China.  I stopped in China for 3 days to visit friends and then continued on to a humanitarian project in Nepal sponsored by CHOICE Humanitarian.  CHOICE Humanitarian is an organization that is working to help relieve poverty in small villages in several parts of the world by empowering people to improve their lives through health, education, and economic development projects.

I was fortunate that I was traveling to Kathmandu via China because 

my flight landed in Tibet and then went right past Mt. Everest on the

way to Nepal.  It was a beautiful clear day and  the scenery was spectacular!  

I was lucky to get this picture from the window on the plane

Kathmandu is a busy, bustling, tourist friendly city with lots of interesting things to see.  I arrived around noon and only had one afternoon before we went to our village the next day. After checking in to my hotel I went to see one of the main attractions, the Boudhanath Supta.

This Supta is a very famous Buddhist shrine that I spent an hour 

walking around taking some beautiful pictures.

I especially liked all the colorful prayer flags.

The next morning a group of 18 volunteers boarded a bus and traveled 7 hours

 to the village we would be working in for the next 5 days.

22 bricks!

We arrived in the village of Bhorletar (pop 2500) situated in a beautiful valley below some towering peaks of the Himalayas.  The highest peak in this group  is 26,781 feet above sea level.

When we arrived at the village,  much of the town came out to greet us and lead us in a procession to the small college where we would be housed and where our project was to take place.

 In Nepal when someone special arrives they get the FULL treatment!  

Flowers, special scarfs, and red powder, red powder and more red powder.

 CHOICE Humanitarian is working to rehabilitate this small college (180 students) that is for very poor students that live in local villages up to 3 days walk away.  They had already repaired roofs, installed window frames, and added another floor to a classroom building.  We were there to help students and community members to paint the buildings.  Later, glass is being added to the windows and a computer lab is being developed for the school.

 OSHA approved scaffolding.

 

 Women gathering wood near the school.

One morning we hiked through the village and up a hill for about an hour to a very small 

settlement to see some of the other projects that CHOICE has been involved with.  

Some (if you saw the movie Meet the Mormons) might recognize Bishnu Adakhari, the director in Nepal.

Here is a farmer, his wife & grandson

Pig raising operation.  Farmer borrows $250 from bank to buy pigs and builds pens, 

6 months later sells the pigs for $1000 and pays back bank and raises more pigs.  CHOICE 

is teaching these subsistence farmers how to borrow money and expand their operations.

Biogas system.  Animal manure and human waste create methane gas that is

 collected and burned in kitchen instead of a wood cooking fire.

CHOICE has helped over 1,000 villages in Nepal over the past 18 years.

 

 Every night villagers would come and play music, dance and have us join in.

One of the CHOICE staffers that LOVES to dance.

Men I met in the village.  GB is wearing a traditional Nepalese dhaka topi (hat). 

He was a soldier in Croatia.  Many Nepalese men have been soldiers in 

various conflicts around the world.

After our stay in the village I traveled an extra day to Pokhara, 

a  scenic area near the Anapurna Range.

 

There were some great views of the high mountains and I even did a little hiking.

Buddhist Peace Memorial

After Pokhara I flew back to Kathmandu and had one more afternoon free

before my trip back home.  I chose to go to the Pashupatinath Temple.

It is a Hindu temple situated on the banks of a river that flows into 

the Ganges, so it is a very important location.  Hindus believe that the dead 

should be cremated as soon as possible after death.  This temple performs an 

average of 50 open air cremations per day, 24/7.

It was very interesting watching several cremations at various stages being conducted.

After the cremation is complete then the ashes and remaining wood are pushed into the river.

 These Hindu monks were more than willing to have their picture taken...for a price.

The trip was a great success.  I got to see old friends from China and participate in 

a worthwhile service project in Nepal.  I had the added benefit of of some beautiful

scenery, new friends, and new cultural experiences.