December 31, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
December 31, 2011

As the Christmas season approached we stayed pretty busy with ward and class activities. Nancy did a lot of cooking and baking in her tiny oven during the month of December. She made some great treats and the cranberry salsa was a hit everywhere we went. Christmas is a great season for doing kind things for others and many people were especially nice to us as well. We are grateful for the many cards, letters, hugs, and rembrances we received. These really helped us overcome our home sickness. Some of our students are far from home and they hung out later after classes to talk as well. It made us feel good that they wanted to share that time with us.
On the first Sunday in December our Singles Branch was responsible for the main course of the YSA dinner before the Ist Presidency Broadcast. As the YSA advisors we didn’t have a lot to do but help and fret that all would work out. Three young men had car problems so they came to our apartment with us, had snacks, and then rode along with us to and from the dinner & broadcast .
On the third Sunday evening we took a young woman from our building to a sing along performance of Messiah at the stake center. Several members of our classes were either playing in the orchestra or singing in the choir. The chapel was tightly packed with music lovers, the music was beautiful, refreshment were sweet, and the feelings tender that evening.
Here’s some photos of our Christmas zone meeting. We had a class that morning so we got there just in time for the luncheon and talent show.



How quickly a year passes! We were as Matt and Kathy were here that just one year ago they were helping us shampoo carpets and getting the house ready to rent out before we left for the MTC. Matt, Kathy, Daniel and Kylie arrived on the 22nd, Matt’s birthday. We celebrated with a little cake in their hotel room. While they were here we saw a lot of the great city of Philadelphia’s historical landmarks. Here we are at Valley Forge National Park.

Here we are at the Camden, New Jersey, Aquarium. Nancy said, “Jim, stand under that tree and catch some poop!”

Here we are at Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware for the Christmas Day reinactment. The boat is just over Kylie’s head.

Here we are at Constitutional Hall and the Liberty Bell.

Nancy and Ben are very best friends at the Franklin Institute. Daniel is riding the high wire.

Matt and Kathy are watching the fountains at Longwood Gardens. Kylie is putting the scarlet topiary to shame.

Everyone looks happy for the photos!

December 7, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
December 7, 2011

From our journal it might appear that we don’t do any missionary work. It looks like we spend all our time sightseeing from the photos we post. But we want everyone to know that we are working hard. That being said, last week we had some time while we waited for the return bus after attending an inservice & Christmas get-together with the other CES missionaries from New York and New Jersey in Manhattan.
As far as we know we are the only CES missionaries from Eastern Pennsylvania. At the Manhattan CES center we met with about 12 other couples and swapped war stories. Everyone wants to know how many classes other the couples are teaching, what their apartments are like, extra duties, and class sizes. It was a lot like any other teacher conference except that we start with prayer and are extra polite to each other. Talking with other people doing much the same thing we are was comforting and reaffirming.
We walked from the 42nd Street bus station to the CES building on 15th Street and helped get the place ready for the program and luncheon. On the way back we went by Union Square, Times Square, Macys, and the Rockefeller Center. If we had been thinking we might have gone that way early with a poster and gotten on the Today Show.
First, a photo for my sisters who may be wondering “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”:

The Empire State Building was in the background when we took the photo but it magically disappeared. Was there an illusion of the building? We were sure it was in behind us.

Nancy at a Macy’s animated window display. Even the windows are busy here.

Jim and Nancy in Times Square.

Large decorations for the Big Apple.

It’s hard to believe but we were relieved to get back to the comparative relaxed pace of Philadelphia that night. We were glad that we didn’t have to drive in New York City. Public transportation is the way to go. Some of the missionaries who did have a car in New York told us they paid as much as $400 a month just for parking.

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
November 22, 2011
“Moving On Up” along with the Jeffersons.

We are now on the 11th floor after it was determined that the apartment management would not fix the heat in our old apartment. What these are views from the top and like you, Sister Blattman has never actually seen them because of her fear of heights. First, the view of nearly straight down:



The photo below takes in the view to the South East. The upper arrow points to the famous Jewish synagogue, Beth Shalom, the only synagogue designed by Frank Loyd Wright. In this synagogue the seats of the congregation are in 12 tribal groups that face somewhat towards the central ark and are on an undulating floor with tan carpet that mimics sanddunes as if the congregation is gathered in the desert about the Tabernacle of the Exodus.
The lower arrow points to Kenneth Israel, another of the three synagogues along this road. There is also a rabbinical college nearby.

Leaning out the window and looking to the North East, the shopping center is visible in the distance just past the edge of the brick edge of our great and spacious building.

Here is Sister Blattman’s ‘kitchen in a closet’. Cooking is a one woman operation. The oven is just large enough for a cookie sheet. As you can see, the frig could hold a few more photos should anyone want to send us some.

November 15, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
November 15, 2011

The color and beauty of the trees in Philadelphia in the Fall are best described in pictures. Sister Blattman looks like she could be singing, “I could take a handful and make a treat!” of bright red maple leaves. Sister Blattman is showing off some of the splendor in a park near our apartment.

Here she is with another of the seemingly endless number of hardwood trees. We are reminded of the scripture:
“And out of the ground made I, the Lord God, to grow every tree, naturally, that is pleasant to the sight of man; and man could behold it.”

Elder Blattman is less outwardly exuberant about having his picture taken but inwardly he is of course very thrilled.

November 4, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
November 4, 2011

The Elders often tell us that they feel safe on the streets of the inner city in Philly because of their
conspicuous missionary appearance, especially their name tags. They have many stories of instances when someone is hasseling them on the street or subways that many of the locals will quickly come forward to their defense. They report that when a new Elder transferrs
into an area he is often welcomed by the many men who hangout on the streets.
The Elders are always friendly and are well liked. As a result they are sometimes asked for a
good word, a prayer, or they are given a friendly ribbing when they pass by.
However,that being said, the streets of Philly and Camden are anything but
safe. One Elder told us that two of the men he had been teaching in Camden were
shot, one of them fatally in his presence. Another woman spoke in sacrament
meeting last spring and recounted the many sons of her friends and relatives
who had been killed by gunfire. Stitches and bullet holds trace out violent
histories on the skin of some of the living.
We are not nervous when we drive in these
neighborhoods. The rates of many types of crimes are actually not that much
greater than in a rural area like Winnemucca but there are tens of thousands of
people living closely together here. The
chances of being involed in a violent act may not be that much greater, but the
chance of witnessing one is much more likely. In our forrays into the inner
city we have become acustomed to the screaming sirens and flashing lights of
ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars. Last Thursday was a first however, as
a pack of emergency vehicles streamed past us on a main street, they came to a
stop a couple blocks ahead, blocking the entrance to a side street. Just as we
passed along the same road we heard a shot fired. We don’t know who or what it
was about. It didn’t seem prudent for us to turn back and gawk (although I
really wanted to). There were other reports of shootings in the news the next
day but nothing of this event. It was
just another night in the city.
On a brighter note, we have
begun a new class with wives of medical or dental students
who have small children. We were
not able to entice them to the chapel for a class, whether due to having to
bring their children or due to the fact that the going to the chapel without
their husbands made them feel unsafe. So
if Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, then bring the mountain to Mohammed. We are having class in their apartments with
various ones taking their turn with hosting.
Some apartments are quite small and class size plus children equal a lot
of bodies in a compact area. Needless to
say, we don’t do chalkboard talks or power point presentations, but do a lot of
discussing. These sisters are really
quite delightful to teach and have a lot on the ball. Many are returned missionaries and well
founded in the Gospel. I have to admit,
though, last week the apartment was on the fifth floor and had a balcony. I
spent a lot of time worrying about the small children out on the balcony
playing and thinking somehow they would fall over the edge. You know me and the fear of heights. Anyway
it may develop into two classes pretty soon with so many coming. Great!!!

October 26, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
October 26, 2011

Our cultural excursion this month took us to the Mennonite Tabernacle Museum in Lancaster, PA, with our CES director, Brother Muldowney. The Mennonite Tabernacle Museum has a full size mock-up of the Israelite inner sanctuary and other interesting recreations of the portable temple. We were asked not to photograph the inside of the building so I clipped the image of the motorized high priest and Ark of the Covenant from their internet brochure.

The rolling hills around Lancaster and the well-kept Amish farms made for a lovely countryside. The homes were mostly white, many with clothes hanging on lines stretched across the wide porches. Much of the corn was still standing, tall and thick in straight rows making rectangular blankets over the rolling hills. Busy men in black clothing looked like they were standing on the wagon tongues of farm equipment drawn by horses through the fields. We passed by a small white school building with boys dressed in black, some wearing flat topped straw hats, and girls in blue cotton dresses playing in the grass outside. There were several small black carriages handled by bearded men in black hats and pulled by ponies at a surprisingly fast trot along the roadway. The auto traffic swerves around the horse drawn equipment barely noticing its modern incongruity.

We stopped briefly at a railroad museum to watch some steam locomotives chug back and forth in a switchyard as they rearranged some cars for their daily tours about the area. Water vapor from the steam engines plumed up from their stacks and the smell of burning coal and grease tinged the cool air.
Here is a photo of one of the farms as seen behind the railroad museum

October 7, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
October 7, 2011

The colors of Fall in Pennsylvania are beginning to paint the upper leaves of the trees like the colors of the dipping evening sun. There are yellows in the locusts, pinks and reds in the maples, and dark purples in some magnificent ones that might be beech trees. We travel to our classes along the tree lined lanes oooing and ahhing to each other like children watching the first sprays of 4th of July fireworks. Fall’s full show of color will not begin for a couple weeks but we are anxiously watching for it. Here’s a little maple tree outside our apartment and a maple leaf from a trail we walked today.

We took our exercise this afternoon by walking the paths in a nearby park to get some photos of the trees before they lose all their leaves.

Mitt Romney’s presidential bid has focused a lot of attention on the Church here. When Rick Perry’s minister friend declared that Mormons are not Christian he sparked a furor of response that has put the Church in the spotlight in the papers and on the news shows. The strong Jewish population in Philly took immediate offense at the Baptist minister’s remarks because it smacked of intolerance and bigotry towards all but evangelicals. Our class members report that conversations are springing up with neighbors and coworkers about the Church. Yesterday at WalMart, while we were helping a woman from our building buy tires, the service manager wanted to know where he could go to attend our church and the woman we were helping had a similar conversation with someone else.
We have been inspecting missionary apartments. Some apartments are fairly nice and well kept, others are worse than a frat house on Monday morning. Some apartment buildings are obviously very old. The woodwork on the stair rails, door casings, and other moldings in the older apartments is interesting to see. Nineteenth century craftsmen did some beautiful and lasting work. As I admire the moldings I can’t help but think that the lead based paints are just a few layers down on the thickly coated woodwork. We ran into one pair of elders just as they were coming home for lunch. As we entered their apartment they presented us with a Ziplock bag with some bed bugs that they had captured on their mattresses. Nancy choked back her disgust to take a good look in the bags so she could confirm that we don’t have of that kind of bug in our apartment. Yet. It was hard not to walk around the infested apartment on tiptoe and we didn’t sit down on the furniture while there. We are getting bites from something in our apartment but we don’t think its bed bugs.
Enrollment in our classes has much improved with the start of a new school year. Our subjects this semester are Doctrines of the Gospel and Pearl of Great Price. At the moment we are trying to add another daytime class to be taught in a circuit in the homes of young mothers whose husbands are in school.
Sports reign here in Philadelphia. Walking down the halls of church or along city sidewalks one can here the teams: The Phillies, the Eagles, the Flyers, and the 76ers sprinkled in nearly every conversation. Go Phillies! Sister Blattman holds her own about the players and on the latest standings of the ball teams. Elder Blattman often pretends to follow the conversation, sagely nodding his head, and hoping he won’t be required to know if the conversation is about football or baseball. In Philly the newsstands don’t carry much in the way of woodworking magazines and around the city the outdoor sporting goods stores are few and far between.
Rock walls, stacked and mortared, are found everywhere in Philadelphia. Scarcely any home is not built of rock or surrounded by rock fences and retaining walls. Even brick walls are sometimes struck with a stone here and there to break the regularity of it. Watching some contractors build some new walls also shows that it is done with great effort and expense. For modern construction, a regular concrete block wall is built on a wide footing with drainage pipes and gravel backfill. Then another 16 inch layer of stone is mortared to the blocks to create a very thick decorative wall. And here in Philly they often like to go back and fill the gaps with mortar to create a smooth wall. Mosses, ferns, and lichens grow on the rocks to make a very pleasing landscape.

September 28, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
September 28, 2011
The Angel Moroni will Descend upon Philadelphia

The ground breaking ceremony was held last Saturday for the new Philadelphia Temple and it was televised at each of the chapels in the 8 stakes in this area. The event was reported widely and one of the local papers headlined that the “Angel Moroni will descend on Philadelphia.” We picked up a couple women from one of our classes who don’t have a car and we watched it at one of the downtown chapels. There are about 1.5 million people in Philadelphia and we would guess there are at least 10 times that many people in the cities nearby.

As you can see from the buildings in the background at the dedication, the temple will be built right downtown.
Two of the speakers at our summer seminary, Vai Sikahema and Ahmed Corbitt participated in the temple dedication program. They are from the Cherry Hill New Jersey Stake Presidency. Vai Sikahema is a popular sportscaster on TV and Ahmed Corbitt (stake president) is the Church’s public relations director. We were much impressed by their willingness to come talk to the few kids at summer seminary. President Sikahema’s talk about how his family went to the New Zealand temple was inspiring. He is a frequent contributor to the Deseret News.

Vai Sikahema with summer seminary and with Elder Eyring.
We forgot our camera on the day President Corbitt came to our summer seminary dressed in character as a Chautauqua impersonation of Joseph Smith Jr. Here is a photo of him giving a similar performance at a youth conference. To our little band quoted the whole of Doctrine & Covenants section 1 and played a game with them where he would tell them the section from the D&C if they read to him any verse at random.

September 21, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
September 21, 2011

Monday we had our monthly cultural excursion at the Brandywine Art Museum. This museum is built inside an old mill on the Brandywine River in one of the most beautiful river valleys we have seen. Brother Muldowney, our CES director was our tour guide. He still teaches some art classes in the summertime for the National Academy of Arts so we received a wonderful amount of information.
The Brandywine Museum features the art of Andrew Wyeth who is famous for his illustrations for Treasure Island, Kidnaped, The Last of the Mohicans, and many other books. You may recognize these illustrations from Treasure Island. The actual paintings are very large, the size of a kitchen table, and they are most impressive and very colorful.

These next photos are of Nancy standing beside the old Brandywine Mill and of us together by the river. The area near the museum is also a battlefield of the revolutionary war. The British, under the command of General Howe, landed their forces at the mouth of the Delaware and began to march north towards Philadelphia (then the capital of the United States). Washington sent his forces to head them off by holding the fords on the Brandywine River. The British had superior numbers and knowledge of the area and defeated the continental army in this battle. We were told that there were a lot of Tories among the settlers along the Brandywine and perhaps that had an influence on the outcome of the battle as well.

September 15, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
September 15, 2011

We are back to our usual routine, studying making, Power-Point slides, fighting traffic to get to one of the chapels to teach a class, and then coming home late to collapse at the apartment only to repeat it all again perhaps but with an umbrella in hand the next day. Nancy bakes cookies every other day. Nothing invites the spirit like homemade oatmeal and raison cookies. The Elders from next door have a standing dinner appointment every Wednesday. They are such well-mannered and hardworking puppies.

We really look forward to being with each group of students. One young mother broke into tears on Monday morning as she recounted the relief she felt in being able to have a spiritual break in her week by attending institute class. The ladies all rushed to comfort her and Elder B. looked for a door to escape through. On Wednesday evenings we have a large class of mostly elderly students. These geriatric students, as we fondly call them, do share one thing with the younger students in that most of them are single. Many of the women have outlived their spouses. They too crave the feelings of shared spirituality that institute classes provide. We are sometimes a little hoarse after class from shouting because several don’t hear well. “Eh? What did he say?” is a frequent refrain in that class. Our class from the inner city also has unique individuals but the same sense of finding comfort in sharing the scriptures with others. One young man from the city ward has started attending community college. He is a little nervous about his English class and sent us a paper he wrote so we could correct errors. Reading his experiences was a reminder that most of us have no idea of the difficulties of growing up in impoverished cities.

We have our fun days. We went to the movie ‘Contagion’ this week. It made us more conscious of the practice that Mormons shake hands with everybody which pretty much negates opening doors with your elbow and wiping the handles of shopping carts. So we also went to WalMart and got our flu shots soon after seeing the movie.

These two photos are taken from the “Rocky Steps” at the Philadelphia Art Museum after we had seen the Rembrandt exhibit on “The Faces of Jesus.” Next week we will be going to the Brandywine Art Museum. At this rate we shall be some of the most cultured people we know pretty soon. Perhaps we can become more discriminating yard sailors when we get home and find great art treasures.

And this is the view from our apartment window during one of the most recent rain storms. We love the rain. Besides being refreshing, the rain keeps the college kids from partying in the parking lot.