Week 8

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
February 21-27, 2011

Apartment Living
As we drove home from class last night I commented that I don’t worry about passing up our apartment building because we approach in the darkness it looms up in my imagination in front of us like a great ocean liner. Nana, steeped as she is in the scriptures lately, remarked that it looks to her like the ‘great and spacious building’ from Lehi’s dream. There is an iron fence around the complex but it’s nothing a person can hold on to.
Apartment buildings are ‘great and spacious buildings’ where strangers live closely without interacting very often. We try to break the unspoken rules of apartment anonymity of non-engaging each other and we give a cherry ‘Hello!’ in the elevator once in a while. At first we grinned at everyone and ‘Hello-ed’ like the fresh country bumpkins we really are, but now we give more business-like greetings, “Good Morning”, etc. Otherwise, in quiet mode, we all just stand so close in the elevator we can smell each other’s deodorant yet we pretend the others are not there.
The doors in our hallway all have louvers that vent the smell of what’s cooking among the 25 families on our floor. Stepping out of the elevator reveals tantalizing aromas of corned beef & cabbage, exotic Korean dishes, & baking cookies (that’s Nana). It’s a mystery how can we all be so intimate and yet so distant. Some days when we enter our floor it’s like coming into the church for a potluck dinner only everyone has taken their hot-dish into separate classrooms.
Down Town
Saturday Nancy had a Relief Society service project to make blankets to give to the hospitals for new-borns. I used the time to clean trash from around the building. The church really is a lighthouse in this area of the city. People really seem to want to just come in and relax with other members. In the evenings the foyer often has people sitting there talking as if they were in a living room at home. We’ve had two non-members who have come in to our classes and take part like everyone else. The basketball court is especially important in the inner-city. It’s in use most every evening.
We took a sister home after class the other night. It turned out to be quite a distance that she would have had to ride the bus and then walk through a neighborhood that was pretty scary. In the daylight the streets look just narrow and dirty. At night, they look dark and ominous. Every corner has imagined menaces. Last night Nana made dinner for a woman who was bedridden after surgery and we again made the journey into the dark streets of North Philly. When we got to the public housing, Nana hopped right out and went over to a group of young men to ask for directions to the correct apartment. The boys were friendly and helpful. The bedridden woman’s door wasn’t locked (she couldn’t have gotten up to open it) and Nana went right up. I think our fears are generated from watching too many episodes of “COPS” on TV. Sister B is in front of the church. Brother B is on the road behind the church.