New Year, New Adventures 2012

December 30th, 2011 marked our 41st year of marrital bliss, so we celebrated our anniversary by eating out, of course, at one of the fancy restaurants here in Larnaca!  *     *     *        *        *

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The hamburgers and fries were excellant!

We seem to do a lot of eating, but here is our New Years Eve Celebration with Elders Rahal, Held and Psota. Elder Norgaard is taking the picture. All four were transferred the following day!  We miss them already.

Elder Held got to baptize Melita just hours before leaving for the office to be  President Charles' assitant. It was really cold at Mario Georgievi's (branch president councilor) pool

but there were hot towels and a hot room and, of course, the Holy Ghost waiting to warm her into the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was our first baptism to witness here and hopefully the next one will be in the Mediterranean Sea!  We love this sweet little Phillipine sister!

Here is an old lady with Elder Rahal (England) and Norgaard (Denmark). What wonderful missionaries for the Lord!  We feel like they are our sons or grandsons-- according to how old I feel each day! Even though we know the transfers are inspired, it is a hard thing to let them go.  Maybe we will see them later on their missions as both of them go home about the same time we do.

We can't be sad too long as these beautiful sisters, Roberts (Holland) and Virkamaki (Finland) flew in to lift and brighten our missionary service here. Wow, their picture disappeared.  It might be at the bottom of this post. Sorry.

 We had an amazing experience going to the Turkish side of Cyprus in the north through some fences and look out posts, gates and armed guards. We are pictured here with the other two missionary couples, the Niebuhrs and Smiths who accompanied us. Our assignment was to check on these two Nigerian students, the only two we have found so far on the Turkish side who are members.

Here we are with these incredible young men who attend the Eastern Mediterranean University in Farmagusta Cyprus. Since religious freedom is not permitted there, we had a nice talk about their lives. Jolly is in his 6th year at the school and has only been able to attend church the two times when he visited his home in Nigeria. Agille is a convert of six months and came to the University right after being baptized. They have to help each other through the long months of not having any contact with the church.

 Since we had to leave our name tags at home and dress like tourists, we decided to act like them too, and visited an amazing walled ancient city there in Farmagusta. It was devistating to see what the Turks did to the city when they took over in 1974. The beautiful  Cathedrals, the ones that survived the attack, are turned to Mosques and all the crosses are knocked off and replaced with minerets.  Sad.

Virgil and Elder Smith got tired and had to take a break from all the amazing things we got to witness. We were tempted to buy things at all the shops, but resisted this time, lucky for these old boys!

Virgil must have been bored to make friends (just for me and the grand kids) with this cute stray!

Here they are! Sisters Roberts and Virkamaki!  This blogging thing doesn't seem to be getting any easier, but hopefully it will be worth it when we look back at our Christensen Mission Adventure here in wonderful Cyprus!