Another week gone here in Jihlava, and things are still pretty good. We stayed pretty busy this week with meetings and phone calls. In most of our meetings we didn’t get to teach much, just kind of talk about the church or about other things, but we are hoping this week that we’ll be able to teach and testify a lot more now that those people understand a little more about what we do and our mission here. Again it’s difficult to say too much due to European privacy laws, but we met some pretty cool people from all around this week. One of our meetings this week was a farewell party for the Hamons, who were a senior couple that came here from New Zealand, and served in Jihlava for 18 months. The whole branch of the church came to love and appreciate them, and they loved the branch back. It was amazing the good they were able to do here, and the friendships they were able to make with the people here, when neither of them speak the same language. There’s always a way for us to help others if we will sincerely look for it. The Lord will help us to help those around us.
As for the subject line this week, I just wanted to highlight one of the funnier things that I’ve seen a lot here. Jihlava has a lot of young families that live in it, and so there are always a lot of little kids running around. We see a lot of them as well because we live right next to an elementary and preschool. I guess they like to take the preschoolers on field trips a lot, or perhaps they’ve decided that if they just walk them around enough the kids will be too tired to misbehave, but you always see these groups of 20-30 preschoolers and a couple of teachers just walking around the town. All the little kids wear these bright neon vests so they don’t get lost. I was watching these teachers corral the kids on to a bus this past week when the phrase “Czech Child Herders” just popped into my mind and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. It’s probably not as funny as I think it is but something about watching the teachers chase little kids in neon vests, and frantically try to cram them onto a busy city bus just seems so ridiculous to me. I love it so much.
The other fun thing we did this week was we went and visited the ruins of this castle out in the hills surrounding Jihlava. It was the first real castle I’ve been to here, and it was quite the experience. It was so foggy when we got there we didn’t even know the castle was there until we were almost to the walls. It was amazing. That’s it for this week, hopefully I’ll have some better stories for everyone next week.
