Week 31 - Beginning of Transfer 5 (and companion 5)

Cute Fam. Vandenberg made sushi and decorated for Zuster Aston's last dinner appt. in the land

Overnachten in Antwerpen.. these 3 sisters in the front are now home!

My BEAUTIFUL greenie! Her first stroopwafel!

Zuster H! And a Belgian sunset. 

Zuster N! She is a dietician and married to an African and the sweest ZHV pres. and joint teach and Zuster B's aunt. 

Old district! 

Zone P-day

Antwerpen!

Hoi familie, 

I love greenie fire - I feel like I'm in Groningen all over again with this contagious feeling of fresh and new excitement about the work. Zuster Hansen is a go-getter, talking to everyone and anyone and insisting on speaking Dutch with me all the time. She's a natural and I'm learning so much from her already.  She found 8 potential investigators in our first two days together, and we've been looking up a lot of promising potentials, and it feels good to be weeding through our current investigators and finding new, sincere investigators.  T is going to start reading Talmage's "The Great Apostasy" and we're hoping that something will click with understanding the necessity of the Restoration. We had 5 investigators in church, including Abdel who is working on stopping smoking in order to be baptized by 6 December. Jasmine, a sweet 16 yr old Belgian girl who ordered a family history pamphlet from the Facebook campaign, proved to be very curious about our message and invited us to come back next week and explain the Book of Mormon.

We went to Herentels to look up Mr. L, a referral, and met two older Flemish women who lived in some type of old shop (the inside was medieval library/ museum- like) who commended us for so boldly and valiantly proclaiming our faith, and gave us candy and coke for the road, and something about the whole situation felt like an interesting dream. We also gave a card to a teen barely wearing any clothes and intoxicated out of her mind, and it made me sad because I wonder what her hopes/ dreams/ fears are. We stopped by Livinyan, a girl who we'd given a Romanian BoM, and were able to talk to her and her friend. We also had a cool lesson after church with Michael, and he prayed for the first time ever.  J is still disappeared and his baptismal date has passed, except for the fact that we saw him on Z. Aston's last night when we were on the bus and he was waving furiously through the window at us.. so we got out at the next stop and she was able to say goodbye and he was able to tell us a less convincing stroy about why he hasn't been answering his phone..but we haven't been able to get a hold of him since.

November truly is going to be a maand van wonderen (month of miracles). In fact, our branch has a calendar where everyone is encouraged to sign up for a day this month to fast (it doesn't have to be food, it can be another sacrifice i.e. TV) for missionary work, and we call and tell them the miracles that happened that day.. I encourage you all to choose a day to fast for the missionary work in Turnhout! (: 

Glad you had a happy halloween.. they had a few decorations in shops and apparently halloween-themed parties, but no trick or treating.. guess what we dressed up as this year? (: Love you all!!!!

Veel liefs, 

Zuster Riley 

 photo from Elder Elkins 

From the mission blog: Zuster Riley meeting Zuster H for the first time, at the mission home in Leiden

It's always fun to find Eliza mentioned on other Belgium missionaries' blogs. Found her on Zuster Bush's blog:
 Last P-day I got a black eye. Woot woot. We played soccer and Frisbee for zone p-day and me and Sister Riley smacked heads!  A few hours later I noticed a black eye. My first one! haha.