Weekly Young Adult Feeding

     One of the fun aspects (and there are many of those) of our mission is our new responsibility to feed about 15 Junge Erwachsenen (Young Adults) who take part in weekly Church Institute classes on Wednesday evenings. Last week I chronicled their first experience with Chicago-style Stuffed Pizza, and this week, we came up with an all-American dinnertime standard, Sloppy Joes, with (KFC knockoff recipe) cole slaw.

These college-age German youth come to the Church building on Wednesday evenings, receive instruction for about 75 minutes, then thunder down to the kitchen/game room for some eats. We really enjoy the opportunity to feed these kids, and at this early stage, it's a bit of a challenge to find the proper ingredients to essentially American dishes.

    Tonight was something of a going-away party for Ashley Alves (girl in back hoisting a Sloppy Joe, with glasses and cornrows), who will soon be going off to University. She has been a terrific leader for the JEs, with a strong mind and wonderful heart.

    I have to laugh. Last week's Friday night JE activity was supposed to be a picnic, but it had rained pretty much all day, and the ground was pretty wet. Everyone else wanted to bail and just have it at the Church building, but Ashley just wouldn't have it. She wanted a real picnic, and she wanted it in the park! So, like sheep, the rest of us piled into our cars and headed over to the Freiburg Stadtgarten. It was dark, cold, windy, and wet, but we put down a tarp, laid out a bunch of random junk food, drank from common bottles of soda, and belted out Bohemian Rhapsody (Lynn Winterhalder, Bishop's daughter, had brought a Bluetooth boom box). It was a bit surreal for us old folks, and we had a lot of mud to clean off our shoes, but it was still a weird kind of fun.

    Anyway, since Ashley is going away, as a side to the Sloppy Joes and slaw, I made her some of her favorite food, guacamole. She quickly took control of the bowl and chips. 

    One of the fun aspects of this type of activity is the hunt for the proper ingredients to these dishes. It brings a sense of adventure to assembling all of the necessary parts to the meal. What also happens is it affords us the opportunity to make positive contact with the local tradespeople.

    When Leesa and I served our first missions in the 70s, Americans had (and to some degree, still have) a kind of bad reputation amongst Germans, mostly due to the thousands of young and inexperienced (and often drunk) soldiers serving in Europe under the then-European Enlistment Option. Many of them were young and brash, and it could rub people the wrong way. Well do I remember the 4th of July spent in the city of Heidelberg, where the city put on a big American Independence Day celebration for the military personnel. 

    As my companion (Frank Vaughn of Vacaville, CA) and I stepped from the train from Kaiserslautern, about 50 yards away was a crowd of "Amis" (American soldiers). Most of these people wanted to go back Stateside as soon as possible, calling those about to return "short-timers." And we heard this boozy cry go up from this crowd, "28 days! I only got 28 days left! I'm so short, I bet the rest of y'all got a hunnerd years!"

    Well, Elder Vaughn turned to me, a very new and green missionary, and said, in German, "You speak one word of English today, and I'm gonna leave you here."

    So it's fun to go into a store now, and engage the local tradespeople. I like to perhaps confound a few negative expectations with a positive, happy, fun, and most of all, polite and respectful attitude when I ask for some of the ingredients I need. The people at the meat counter looked at me like I'd lost my mind when I asked for 3kg (about 6.5 lbs.) of lean ground beef, at least until I told them how many young people I was cooking for. Once the situation was clear, they were also fun and helpful.

    Same story when ordering the buns at the bakery, although when I picked them up, the nice lady told me the baker was on strike (I had to laugh; I pictured some crazed guy in a white baker's uniform screaming, "I'm not going to take this anymore!"), and she supplemented my order with brötchen (rolls) which filled the bill very nicely, plus she matched the price of my original order, which was cool.

    The point is, it's fun to begin building these relationships with people (they remember the happy, fat American from "Kalifornien" in his white shirt, tie, and funny nametag), and we nearly always leave them smiling. On the street, we stick out like a sore thumb, like a 6-foot-tall, red-headed Julia Child did doing spy work in China during World War II. That's good PR work for the Church, and of course, a natural part of our jobs as missionaries. Who knows where that will lead? Well, we try to have our attitude coming from love, which is the point of Christianity in the first place. It is one of my primary goals for this mission, to genuinely feel and express love for everyone here as best I can. And I feel we've made a good start.