ICE, MERCY AND JOSEPHINE

Elder Whitney back. 


ICE


Lets be brutally frank up front.  This country is one big ice sheet.  Driving is one thing.  Walking is another.  Utah does not even come close. We tippy toe from one benign looking spot to another, avoiding  compliments of  the family dog, cars and now ice.  In fact, while Mrs. Diamond a Glasgow native was out breaking up the ice on her sidewalk today, she told us that a big one was coming next week, which she went on to clarify was blowing out of "SIBERIA".    I was giving  her a pass along card while Jean was breaking up the ice with a shovel.   It was only yesterday that I mentioned to Sister Whitney that we may as well be in Siberia, to which she scoffed a bit.  Now, it appears Siberia, or at least the wind therefrom, is heading our way.  This made me realize how comparatively close we are to that country or province.      Not in my wildest dreams.

MERCY

From Kenya, Mercy  is a post graduate student at the University of Glasgow, a few short miles from our flat.  She is a law graduate, a member of the Kenya bar association and a shining light in our Young Single Adult Group.  She flew back to Africa last week so that she could be personally present for the swearing in before the bar.   In addition, she is one of the nicest persons I have ever met:  upbeat, pleasant and generous with her time and talents.  Like Josephine below, she is a welcome addition to the cause of Zion, lovely in every respect, as are so many of the young single adults in Glasgow. 

JOSEPHINE

No one can describe Josephine.   Like Mercy, she is a phenomenon to behold.    She is a native of India, part East Indian and I think part Indonesian, not tall, but powerful in more ways than one.  When I first noticed Josephine, she was on the badminton court with other young single adults, quick and powerful.  She is a medical doctor from India, finished her post graduate studies here at the University of Edinburgh, and left Scotland on Thursday  to return home to India, to a "small"  city of only 10 MILLION!  Before she left, she volunteered to buy and make the dinner (typical Indian street food, that the poor eat, which I actually liked), which fed 16 handily, transported it along with a sizable Christmas tree and decorations and table settings in a BACK Pack on her 5 foot or so frame, on ICE by foot in the darkness and on the bus from her flat some distance from the Julien stake house.  The she got it warmed up, served it, did all the dishes and was her typical brilliant self. She bought the tree and decorations from her own funds, then gave them to her friends when she departed for India 4 days later.   A week or two ago, she presented a family home evening lesson where she ended up giving a brief  plan of salvation overload to Rohit,  another graduate student from India who was visiting our home evening activity.      She was met by the Mandarin speaking elders I think last year, was taught and baptized and brought with her a protestant background and at the same time a vocabulary and approach that would suggest in many ways that she had been LDS all her life.  Much like Mercy in this regard, who I think has been a member several years, she will truly be a pioneer among her family and people.   She does so many things with so much energy that we will NEVER  forget her example.  Sister Whitney was mentioning today that briefly knowing these two, and others like them, has already been an experience for which we have been richly rewarded.  We really hope to see them both in Highland for a brief tour of our area.

PHOTOGRAPHS

I am not unmindful that a picture is worth a thousand words.  Therefore, as soon as I can solve a few puzzles posed by a lack of technical savvy, we hope to have graphic illustrations of what and who we are describing.  We actually have photos and even a few short "films" on the Ipad which document not only the people, but also the foreign nature of the English language many of them speak!