And we thought we would never be transferred....!
Can you believe it??!! We have totally enjoyed and fully invested ourselves for 5 months here in Taunton and now we are being transferred to the country of WALES! We will be serving in the most northern, most western part of our mission bountries in a city called Aberystwyth (Aber-ist-with) ! It is smaller than the town we are serving in now and is a little beach front community. We are a 15 min walk down to the prom, as they call it in Wales, and I think we will really enjoy the expereince of living in a smaller beach side community. Although, it is a LONG way away from our mission office. But we are surrounded by the most beautiful, green rolling hillsides, that are full of more sheep pastures than we have yet seen.
We will be changing directions in our assignments a little bit, as Aberystwyth is a university town, we will now get to work with the young adults and institute progam. Mondays we get to be involved with their FHE nights and on Wednesdays we get to feed them dinner and then have an Institute lesson together. They have anywhere from 10-30 students showing up for institute, some are members, some are "friends".
We will be going from a ward here in Taunton, where we have had anywhere from 21-51 in attendance, to a branch where we think about 10 members attend (and that includes all 4 of us missionaries) and could possibly have up to 10 the "friends" who are attending the university or Institute, coming to church on Sunday as well.
Because it is a university town, often the "friends" at Institute are from China, who go home for the summer, but we currently have 2 member students from America attending the university right now, so that is a fun connection!
Tony will most likely be serving in the Bishopric & I will probably end up in the RS presidency again.
We are very sad to leave what now feels like a "home ward" to us. It was a very big blow to the Taunton ward to have their Sr. couple be transferred away, but we hope it will jump start them into strengthening their ward through their own efforts. And everyone is hoping that in the near future another couple will be able to be placed back in Taunton.
Our out & abouts !
We recently were invited by a couple in our ward to go play a game of Skittles. It is an older english game kind of like bowling. Your throw has to begin by having you ball start some where within that wooden strip on the floor in front of you. You are throwing a wooden ball, that by now, isn't even round any more, its lopsided from all the use. The men stand at the end of the lane, where the pins are, and put all the pins back up after each persons turn. You get 3 throws and then its the other teams turn. Once the pins are all set back up, the ball is rolled back to the next player on the sloping wooden track attached to the wall and our scores are then handwritten on an old chalk board! It was totally being thrown back in a time warp, but SO fun!
We had our first Sr Couples retreat to the city of Cardiff, Wales. We went to a place called Saint Ffagans, which is a village where they have collected buildings from all around Wales and created a histroical museum/village with over 50 buildings from the 16th century up unitl the 1920's.
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| Each family was responsible to build their own pew! |
Later that afternoon, we were able to visit Cardiff Castle.
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Nothing like trying to play Code Names with a bunch of Sr Couples ! The church building also had a dart board and a small billard table, so a handful of other couples were on that side of the room. 
We also went to a place called The Big Pit, which is a historical coal mining museum. It was a working coal mine from 1880 -1980. We got suited up with helmets and headlamps and were even given a safety breathing apparatus! We loaded up in the shaft elevator and were dropped down 300 feet to where the original coal mine tunnels were. The youngest workers were 5,6 & 7 yr olds who would sit in complete darkness and open the ventilation doors as workers and coal carts would come and go. They couldn't have candles or lighting of any kind. It was a very depressive thought for us to think about those young kids sitting in complete darkness like that for hours and hours a day.
| A picture of a young mine worker. We couldn't take our phones inside the mine for safety reasons! So no pictures from inside... |
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| Can you find me? I'm the one completely bundled up from head to toe! It is so cold & the mine was even a tad bit warmer than it was outside. I had a sweater, a sweatshirt, my long vest coat, a hat, my scarf & gloves! |
Since we will be moving soon, we took the opportunity to go see the Roman Baths on our day of inspecting missionary flats in the city of Bath. Trying to check off as many sites as possible, but there is so much to see in this country!
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| Entering the city of Bath |
MISSIONARY NEWS !
We were able to participate in our first baptism ! The young elders have been working with Yuleima for about 8 months but we got involved about 2 months ago. We were on the lesson when the elders asked her to be baptized & it was such a treat for the elders to then ask her if she would like her 8 yr old daughter to be baptized with her as well. So we quickly started teaching her daughter every Sunday after church.
And thus, last Saturday, we were able to be apart of 2 baptisms! Our ward had a pretty good turn out given our font is 40 minutes away and that so few of our ward members have cars! We even had members from the local ward attend, as well as other "friends" from up in that area attended as well. We were so happy for the amount of support they received on their special day!
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