Dukelows’ 13th Mission Report 2 Sep to 10 Oct 2007
Prompted by popular demand from our faithful readers who find our reports interesting, we again attempt to record some of our daily activities without boring anyone to death. For reasons unknown to us, our reports usually scramble in e-mail transmission the first and second attempts which is very frustrating because we test them between our e-mail accounts before sending them out to the world. We have reloaded our original software on our laptop so maybe we will get this report out in a readable form the first try….we hope. This report is not in any chronological order.
Sam and Terry Roberts, our former Church Educational System missionaries, left Budapest on 3 October. Bob and Yvonne Wood, their replacements, arrived on 5 October. We found a very nice apartment for the Wood couple in the ritzy second district of Buda, quite close to the Margít Bridge, and only a 20 minute walk to the mission office. The owners of the apartment are ethnic Germans named Schultz whose ancestors moved to Hungary many generations ago. The Schultzs are exceptionally pleasant people. The apartment is in a building built in 1930 and the elevator is the original one that was installed when the building was built. One must use a key to open the elevator door and then step into a big cage that slowly lifts you to the desired floor. The elevator rises on a cable in the middle of the stairwell so there are no walls around it. Similar elevators have been featured in old French movies, Charade comes to mind.
We took the Wood couple shopping on Saturday to the big Auchan super market. They were a bit overwhelmed by this store which is about three or four times as large as a super Walmart with probably 50 check out lanes. We are always surprised at the variety of things we find in Auchan. On this trip we bought some beautiful giant red “Starking” apples from Northern Italy that weighed about one pound each and were absolutely delicious. The only problem with such large apples is one apple is too much to eat for even two people at one time and they tend to turn brown when sliced and stored.
On Sunday, 7 Oct, we enjoyed the satellite transmission of General Conference from Salt Lake City. We went to the stake center in Pest and Elder Dukelow hauled over many extra books and magazines from his storage room to give away. Often our missionaries find their bags are overweight on the night before they return home so they abandon their libraries that they have accumulated during their missions to avoid paying overweight penalties. These perfectly good books along with many copies of the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church study manuals from prior years are now in the hands of people who may enjoy them rather than taking up space in the storage room.
We had many people who are investigating the Church attend the conference broadcasts. Elder Holland’s talk about Mormons being indeed Christians regardless of our rejection of the Christian trinity concept that was first formulated three hundred years after our Savior was crucified quite upset one lady who has a degree in theology from a Catholic university. We will have to work a bit longer with her to overcome this concern. President Eyring’s talk about writing a few lines each day in a journal to record the things God has done for you will surely be a good exercise to follow.
In our never-ending adventures with Hungarian bureaucracy we found last week that Sister Dukelow has a residency permit that expires in March 2008 while Elder Dukelow’s residency permit is good until September 2008. Apparently our young missionaries who were working as the mission office secretaries, and who filed the paperwork when we were still in the US, failed to notice that we had volunteered for a two year mission. They used the standard form letter requesting an 18 month stay that they used for all sister missionaries. It should be a correctable error but it will take some time and more visits to the foreign residents’ registration office. If we can’t correct this mistake, we will be coming home in March.
On 2 October we received 10 new elders and one new sister missionary. They are a fired up group and eager to get to work. The new sister named Moon, was delighted she could read all the signs on the buildings as we drove to the mission office. “Hey, I’m fluent!” she proudly proclaimed. Elder Dukelow asked her a couple of simple questions in Hungarian which brought her back to reality and a concession that she was not as fluent in the language as she thought. Nevertheless, she demonstrated great ability for reading on her first day in country and should be truly fluent in a few months. The elders were also reading the signs as we drove along but not as well as Sister Moon.
We were suppose to receive 11 new elders but one got sick at the Missionary Training Center with influenza and was quarantined for a week. He should arrive tomorrow, 10 Oct. Elder Dukelow will pick him up at the airport because we have Elder Richard Hinckley, President Hinckley, the prophet’s son, visiting here and our Mission President Gasser will be with Elder Hinckley in a conference.
Elder Dukelow and his Hungarian tutor, Gergely Noémi, visited the Ethnographic Museum in Budapest a few weeks ago to discuss the possibility of us obtaining a copy of the Hungarian explorer, Xantus János’ Mormon manuscript. This document is Xantus’ trip report of his 1852 visit to Salt Lake City. He visited with and interviewed most of the senior church leaders at that time. On 8 Oct, Elder Dukelow was able to obtain a digital copy of the manuscript consisting of 63 double sized pages of perfectly legible, almost calligraphic handwriting. We must ask the museum for permission to publish the text but we can now study it privately to our hearts content. It is really fascinating to read. Noémi, who recently published the first half of Talmage’s Jesus the Christ which she translated into Hungarian was instrumental in making the contacts to get the manuscript.
The Ethnographic Museum was hosting the world’s prize winning news photo display so we went to see that exhibit. Unfortunately, most of the photos were about sad subjects, such as war and suffering so it was not very pleasant. On the plus side, we visited the museum’s interactive exhibit of musical instruments from around the world which was very interesting, even fun.
On 21 September we and the other senior couples visited the Hungarian National Memorial Heritage Park at Opusztaszer:
http://www.opusztaszer.hu/site/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1&lang=en
This link will give you an idea of what we saw if you are interested). The weather was ideal and there were no crowds. We were given special attention at their horse show where riders demonstrate the old Hungarian skill of shooting flying objects from horseback with a bow and arrow. Pretty impressive marksmanship.
We had dinner with the group at a local inn. Sister Dukelow had a non-descript Wiener Schnitzel (breaded veal cutlet). Elder Dukelow had a big bowl of mutton stew that was cooked in a cast iron kettle hung above an open fire (bogrács in Hungarian). Unfortunately, the meat was apparently prepared with someone using an axe instead of a knife and there were bone splinters and bone chunks throughout the otherwise quite tasty dish. We should have known the quality of the food at this obvious tourist trap would be less than the highest but the fellowship was good and no one got sick so it was OK.
Our warm weather uniform of short sleeved white shirts for male missionaries changes on 15 October to dark suits for the next six months. We took our winter clothes to the dry cleaners so we could start out fresh and paid approximately $4 for each garment. Do they still have $1.50 and $2.00 dry cleaning in the USA? We hope so.
We had a cold spell at the first of September when the temperature did not get much above 50 degrees Fahrenheit for almost a week. Elder Dukelow was wearing his suits then but the young missionaries stuck with their short sleeved shirts regardless of how cold it got. Everyone complained about the cold so our building turned on the heat before the normal 15 October starting time. Then it turned warm again and we have turned off our radiators and opened the windows to cool off our apartment. We are now enjoying what the Hungarians are actually calling Indian Summer, well they don’t say “summer” but they do say “indian nyar”. The trees are turning colors very nicely and we plan to go into the hills to see all the falls colors.
With the change of seasons, women’s fashions also change as one might expect. We still occasionally see ladies wearing flip-flop shoes but more are now wearing their cowboy boots with short pants. Women wearing what looks like down filled vests are fairly common. Those who acquired tans during the summer seem compelled to show us they have no tan lines, especially in the region below the navel. One would think their tummies would get cold but fashion apparently means sacrificing comfort.
In spite of President Gasser’s stated intent last year around Christmas time that we were not going to commit so much time and mission resources to a Fall concert series, it will happen again because “his Boss” Sister Gasser wants to ring her bells. We have some very talented young folks who can sing and play musical instruments, and a few old folks with similar talents so the concerts start this week and will continue until Christmas. We are thankful that Sister Gasser is a hand bell ringer and not a bagpiper.
Sister Dukelow needed new shoes and attempted to buy them on-line. Our credit card company would not honor the order. So we went shoe shopping in Budapest and after a few hours found her two pairs of comfortable shoes that were wide in the front, narrow in the heel, not pointed in the toe, and dressy but not too dressy. Elder Dukelow is thinking about buying some handmade Vass shoes but has not yet decided whether he can justify the price even if the shoes normally last decades with proper care.
We have had some turnover in missionary apartments. Renting new apartments and closing old ones keeps us on our toes. We now have 52 apartments to worry about. Last week a 50 year old lady who was attempting to rent us an apartment owned by her aged parents caused us some unnecessary headaches. We use a standard rental contract that was prepared by an attorney for all our rented apartments. This lady had never seen a rental contract before and was very unsure of how she should proceed so she sent it to her lawyer who recommended several changes. Most of the changes were very minor and we could accept them without concern. Her last demand for a change was an eviction clause that stated that if we damaged the apartment, we had three days to fix it and compensate her, or she could evict us within three days. We sent her demands to our attorney and he came back with the Hungarian law citation that said an owner must give a tenant at least 15 days written notice before eviction. The lady backed off this demand.
Then as we were ready to sign the revised contract, she read through it one last time and choked on a statement that said, “The tenant (meaning us as the mission) will pay the rent and all the normal utilities. All other expenses will be paid by the owner.” The lady wanted to know what “all other expenses” meant. This was entirely too vague for her. We needed to rewrite the contract to be specific in what we expected her to pay as other expenses. Elder Dukelow almost lost his cool at this point but bit his tongue and explained it was not possible to foresee all possible contingencies that might cause her to have to pay something extra. The point of this statement was we pay for rent and utilities and not for something like a special assessment to repair a damaged roof, for example. She replied it was not fair to require her to pay for something that she could not control but she signed the contract and we moved missionaries into her apartment.
Vodafone’s customer service makes one wonder how they stay in business. One of our missionaries lost his cell phone. We immediately blocked the service to that phone to prevent someone from using it. A month later, the person who found the phone or bought it from the finder turned the phone into Vodafone for repairs because it did not work. Vodafone called us and asked what we wanted to have happen with our recovered phone. We asked that they return the phone to us which they did. We then requested in writing by FAX they restore service to this phone. Two weeks later when we tried to use the phone, the service was still blocked. We called Vodafone and asked what the problem was in restoring service. We were told we needed to request the resumption of service in writing. We pointed out that we had done so two weeks prior. The Vodafone customer service person was able to find our FAX but could not explain why the service was not restored and assured us it would be restored within a few days. It was restored but it makes us wonder about their understanding of the term customer service.
Rose’s brother LaMont and his wife Sandi have gone to Singapore on an 18 month mission. They are an office couple too so that makes it fun to hear about all the things that happen in their office. LaMont’s main job is to pick up and take people to the airport. There is much traveling by air in that mission. Sandi makes the travel arrangements and take care of the cash box. Everything is done by cash except the monthly missionary rent payments. They do much more too but those are the biggies.
Sister Dukelow has started a personal project of reading the Bible from cover to cover. She is now in Deuteronomy 28 after only two weeks. Her questions about some of the very strange things she finds in the Old Testament cannot be answered by Elder Dukelow. He is on his own personal reading plan attempting to read the Book of Mormon again from cover to cover in two months. He is in the middle of Alma and making good progress to achieve his goal. Both readers have found their respective scriptures to be about learning what you should do and then doing it. If you obey God’s commandments, you will be blessed. If you don’t obey, you miss out on blessings.
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