Letters from Elder Spaulding: Week 7 - Life in Bernburg Episode Two: The Crime Scene in the Church

This week has been quite the party.

On Tuesday we had an appointment with a man we found in the area book, Jagnesh, and he seems super cool. He is a chemical engineer, although right now he isn't working while he learns German, and he was just all around prepared by the Lord. His primary language is Hindi, but he speaks several other Indian dialects as well. He speaks Portuguese as well, his girlfriend is from Brazil. She lives in Bavaria and is also receiving missionary lessons. We teach him in English, but all in all he speaks 13 languages.

He has already received several lessons, but he hasn't met with the missionaries in a while, so we started over at the beginning and we are working our way through with him. He actually set his own baptism date (currently the 17th of December) and we will have to see what happens. I'm super excited for him.

We've met with him twice so far, and we will continue to meet with him.

Outside of that we have had English class, play practice (that's right, I'm in a Christmas play), Elder Mayer was attacked by a cat, and a fun little event I alluded to in the subject field.

Saturday night at about 21:45 we were downstairs in the church. I was working on the Area Book, and Elder Mayer was practicing on the organ. We heard glass shatter.

"Elder Mayer, was that you?"

"No..."

(angry shouting in the background)

in unison "Shoot....."

The way the shouting was echoing we thought people were in the church basement. The door to the basement was missing a pane of glass, and we thought they had smashed it in to bypass the lock. (We found out later that that pane of glass had been missing all along.) We armed ourselves with the church's scissors (they look like they've already seen their fair share of combat and possibly committed a few murders.), called Brüder Schütze, the Ward mission leader, and Lebau, just a friend in the ward, and the Polizei. When they got here there were a bunch of people on the street and a very, very drunk guy.

Apparently he was an inactive member of the church and when he heard the organ playing he thought we were burglars inside. He then proceeded to throw his beer bottle into the chapel window. When the police arrived they found out he had a 2.2% blood alcohol content level and they took him off. The next day at church the chapel was a little cold, but everything turned out fine. It was still terrifying though.

That pretty much sums up my week. I'm just a little worried because our adventures have been escalating... who knows what week 12 together will bring. You might want to prepare yourselves for the second coming 😜

Here you go, have some pictures too.

Beautiful German sunrise, like you do.