Interviews and Building Dedications

We are so busy, enjoying the spirit of these wonderful missionaries There won't be much dialogue tonight.  We want the families to see their missionary sons and daughters and to see some of the things the missionaries see nearly every day.
We visited with about 75 missionaries for 20 minutes each this week.  We'll do the other 40 during the next few days.  This is special time for us!  We get to see how much they've grown and learned over the last six weeks.  Some of the growth is truly amazing.  More than the ability to speak the language, it's the ability to look people in the eye with great big smiles on their faces and share what they love.  They are learning to live with someone else and mature as young adults.  We are so amazed at the good things going on here!
Without much dialogue, here are a bunch of pictures of our missionaries:

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Some of the pictures might seem a little blurry.  We didn't use the selfie stick and this old man was a little shaky!  We believe all the smiles were real!  We truly loves these young people.

On Saturday, we were able to participate in the dedication of a new building.  It is truly a beautiful building.  We got to spend more time with a few of our missionaries and local leaders and to participate in the ribbon cutting.  The local mayor, the welfare commissioner for this area of the city and other local and church dignitaries participated.

There was a nice cultural evening that followed with fun skits and then an orchestra and choir.  It was pretty amazing.  Here are a few snippets for you to enjoy.

 

 The missionaries even performed a bit with the local skits.  They had loads of fun.

For the things we saw this week, here's an area that will be blossoming soon.  I hope to have a follow up picture in a few weeks when the blossoms are in full bloom.

 All the kids will remember seeing this movie in the US.  Busses do a lot of advertising around here.

They promote business in unique ways here.  Sometimes you see this in the US.

We had to include a picture of food. This is the seafood dish with noodles call JJampong 짬퐁. It is one of my favorites, but Terri struggles seeing the octopus tentacles in it.  It's red because it's spicy.

Some work was being done this week on the plumbing in our apartment.  The pipes are above my office.  Somehow the pipes broke dumping several decades of sludge.  Gratefully, it was from the sinks and showers and not the other line...  Miraculously, buy the end of the day it was like nothing happened.  They did an amazing job of cleaning up.

Finally, I had to share the beauties of spring from the morning run.  It is like this all over the city.  Traffic is slow sometimes just because folks are amazed by all the colors.  If you can ignore the labored breathing, you can enjoy the colors.  It was a spectacular morning.

This week will be another very busy week.  We have a new missionary, more interviews, training, a weekend of changing leadership and trying to get some sleep.  Who needs sleep when you can enjoy the time we get to with these find young people!