Letter dated 13Apr2015

Dearest Family and Friends, We had such a busy, good week. The weather is getting quite nice, and today people who look like government workers from "Hunger Games" came to the city to clean up the streets! The streets have been full of pebbles that had been used to provide traction in the wintertime, and now those are being removed. After walking on rocks for a couple months, smooth streets feel like clouds. So we are thrilled, even though we don't do that much walking; we have a car. It has been fun trying to learn car rules here. We found out the other day that you can't make a right turn on red. So we had been doing that wrong for a while... Äldste Ward (from Ann Arbor, Michigan) is fun to be with. He has hair the color of the sea Moses parted and can dunk a basketball in a Swedish hoop. We played lots of basketball earlier today. I can now dunk a mini basketball on a 3-meter hoop! We went to Stockholm on Tuesday for a missionary tribal council at the Beckstrands' house. On Wednesday, we went to Stockholm for a couple meetings with stake presidents, high councilors and President Beckstrand. We were blessed with American root beer while there :) Friday we were in Katrineholm all day, first with our zone (the 30 missionaries serving in the neighboring area about the size of Michigan's upper peninsula) for a zone training and then working in that city with different companions. I was with Äldste Higgins! We visited Petra, who has all these dogs! I've never seen so many dogs in one place at a time. See the picture :) We also taught Pia that day. It was really cool to meet her. She started investigating the church 2 weeks ago. She's a little older than I and a Swede, who watched general conference for the first time last weekend and got an answer to each of her many questions -- which were both spiritual and temporal! It was cool to see how prophets' words can help all people. This week we started teaching a really great guy in Södertälje named Aslan. Turns out, aslan means lion in many languages. But this man is human. We called Johnson on Saturday night (we had not met him before), and he came to church on Sunday and we met him! During sacrament meeting, he went up and shared his testimony of coming to church! It was so cool to see that. He is the brother-in-law of our great mission leader here, Okoro. The pictures are of 1) Stockholm, 2) the 3 Michiganders in the zone, 3) me fixing dessert at Italo's and his family's house and 4) all the dogs! It is good to hear that everyone's doing well. Hope you all have a wonderful week next week! Love, -- Äldste Daniel Schindler