February 22, 2008 letter

Here is what Sean said in his email this week:

"Hey so here is the deal. You guys can all email me but i have to write you a letter back. But you guys CAN email me. So do it. But keep in mind that i cannot receive attachments.But tell everybody else that they can email me. So forward this email. And text people. And tell people. Ok? Good. I wanna hear everything that is goin on back at home. So email me.
But if you want to send me pictures or anything you have to send them to this address:
Elder Sean Burton
Belgium Brussels/Netherlands Mission
Boulevard Brand Whitlock, 87
1200-Brussels
Belgium

And that's all for now. Hope to hear from all of you soon.
Love,
Sean"

And in his letter he said:

"My area has 600,000+ people in it. I live in s'Hertogenbosch right next to the train station. You can look on GoogleEarth.com and see it.

My companion, Elder Jensen, is from Castledale, Utah which is by Price. He has been out for a year.

We don't really cook that much. Mostly we just eat easy stuff (sandwiches). We have two dinner appointments that are every week and then we usually have one to two sometimes three additional appointments. Sometime it's good food. Sometimes it's really disgusting like sourkraut, spek (a type of fatty bacon) and mashed potatoes mixed together. BLAH! I almost died it wa so bad. I was sick the rest of the night. B ut we had African food today and it was amazingly good. I liked it. And I've had Spanish, Dutch, Belgium, French, German, African, and South American food. All sorts. Some good, some not so good. But ya.

The weather is sometimes sunny, but not very often. Mostly it's so humid that it's really foggy and always cloudy. And it's cold. And always windy.

We ride our bikes alot. All over the place. We have already ridden 125+ miles. And it's not too bad. My upper legs were already in shape. And we always lock them up. Everybody rides kies here and they get stolen alot. But it's crazy. Bikes have the right-of-way. I've almost been hit by cars and buses all the time. Yesterday we saw a kid on a bike get hit by a car. It's nuts!! But it's pretty fun.

I don't have a branch (when there are not enough Church members to make a ward), it's a ward. There are about 60 members taht are active. They're all pretty nice. Sundays are regular days except for three hours of church.

We tract/contact for 15 or more hours a week. We have a few good investigators. But not really. We tracted into a couple of good ones that seem promising. One that is my favorite:
We were tracting in a place about a 30 minute bike ride from our house. We made an appointment with them for the next week. Then we went to the appointment and started to tech the lady, her son came in and sat down and then he really started to get into the lesson and was way interested and wash asking questions and we hade to make our next appointment so that he would be home because he he wanted to be there. It was awesome! Oh, and he's only 17!! It was way awesome!

I've beento Rotterdam and Den Haag already and I'm going to Amsterdam on Saturday. I haven't been to/seen the temple yet (in The Hague). But I saw a floating red light district. Pretty much the complete opposite. This place has so much sin. It's ridiculous. They have these places called "coffee shops" that are really just hooka lounges whre people go to smoke weed. People start smoking at age 10 here and pretty much everyone smokes. And alot of them smoke weed.

People are so rude to us. I get yelled at all the time. People avoid us, ignore us. People just hate us. And alot of them hate "butenlanders" which means foreigners.

Oh, and I've got another story for you. We contacted this kid on the street and then went to his house a few days later and we were talking to him and he was the only one home. And he started talking about Muslim beliefs and terrorism and shooting people in the back and all sorts of crazy stuff and his TV was on some Turkish terrorist news station that was showing dead bodies. It was nuts, and then his mom came home and we found out that his family was hardcore Muslim with the headwraps and everything. And we aren't supposed to talk to them at all, and the mom freaked out and was yelling at hime in Turkish and then she swore at us in Turkish. I was just waiting for her to pull an AK-47 out of her turban headdress thing. We left a Book of Mormon and got out of there. It was nuts.

Oh, and I don't know if I told you about our street preacher in Den Bosch. He's just a regular guy but goes in the Centrum at night and preaches and yells repentance. It's awesome. And he gives up referrals too. He's not a member, but he believes the Book of Mormon. He stands in the Centrum and yells and his voice booms and echoes throughout the Centrum. It's cool."