Making New Friends

  

 We start this blog post with some "new" friends Elder and Sister Davis have met.  This young man with the glasses is Alexejs.  He is Russian speaking and formerly from the city of Daugavpils but is attending school in Riga.  He was recently baptized and has been attending FHE ever since. 

But without our "old" friends like Dimitrijs who speaks fluent Russian, we might never have known it was Alexejs birthday on that specific FHE night.  Old AND new friends are important to us.

 What to do?  Well, that same night we met another new friend named Esau.  He was visiting Latvia from another country and had brought a cake to FHE.  Sister Davis asked if she could use it as a birthday cake for Alexejs and he said, "Great idea!"

So with two over sized candles on top of the cake, everyone sang, "Happy Birthday" to Alexejs.  Elder Davis, doing what he does best, making sure everyone feels a part of the group.  Alexejs seemed pretty pleased about the birthday wishes.

Left to Right:  Romans, Svetlana, Rudolfs, Viktors, Aivars, Iveta, Denis, Alexejs, Rihard, Olga,  Elina, Esau, Zane, Renars, Elder Davis, Sister Davis, Zane, Marta

We have made many new friends lately because we have had many YSA's returning home to Latvia from their own missions.  Olga was in Russia (Moscow) and is now our Institute Student Council President. 

Dimitri's also served in Russia (hey, its a HUGE country).....and Zane served in Ukraine.



Dimitri's was just made the District Clerk or Executive Secretary.  Zane was just made the Relief Society President in her branch.... :)  That is how important these return missionaries are in the Baltic.

It is a good thing we have had so many missionaries returning home because  another "old" friend was leaving for his mission.  We had a farewell for Rudolfs at FHE because he would soon be going to the  Provo, UT,  Missionary Training Center and then on to Taiwan.

Elina leads the opening song....

 

Maija,  Sister Nelson, Sister Gallacher & Petris singing a hymn.

Rudolfs has a lot of friends, so we ended up with 22 people coming to FHE to say goodbye to him.

Rudolfs talked about his mission call and then the audience was allowed to ask questions.  What Rudolf's didn't know was that the questions (some strange cultural ones and some pertaining to missionary life) had been handed out to everyone beforehand by Marta. She found some unusual things about Taiwan and at first Rudolfs struggled for the answers and wondered by people were asking such strange questions.  His answer was pretty much the same one over and over,  "I don't know", until he caught on to the gag.

We played a few games like, who can sew a button on a shirt the fastest.  Eva competes against Juris, Rudolfs and Alexejs.  It was a tie between Eva and Alexejs. They both got a Snicker bar for their efforts.

Alexejs is a returned missionary himself and had no problem sewing on that button!

We had other games planned but we ran out of time...after all, we had brownies for dessert (a YSA favorite).

On this mission we have realized that friends are important to us.... both new and old friends, are of great value. One is truly silver and the other gold.  We will never forget the friendships we had before our mission and those we made on our mission.