Vilvoorde - part 1

Vilvoorde is a few miles north of Brussels and beneath the path the airplanes take as they leave the Brussels airport. I saw lots of planes. My first companion in Vilvoorde was Elder Reber. I liked Elder Reber a lot. He worked hard and he spoke Dutch to me and he called me Elder Leavitt. I also enjoyed our area a lot as well. The area had many very unusual places ranging from very urban to very rural. Mind you there isn't really such as thing as rural Belgium. A farm in Belgium is about ten acres and many of these farms have very old houses on them. We also had many castles in our area. It was quite strange, we would be going down the streets knocking on doors and then here was a castle. What do you do? Well, we walked across the moat into the the courtyard and then pulled this big handle beside the door that rang a bell inside. A butler came to the door and sat us on chairs in the middle of this huge central room and then the "master" of the house came and sat on chairs opposite us with his wife and we taught them. It was very strange and very cold and formal feeling but we taught them and they listened. When we were done we walked around their grounds for a bit. They had swans swimming in the moat and I went out on a rock and took pictures of the swans. One of them got mad at me and charged me. I stood my ground and took pictures of him right up until he was mere feet away. I have a box upstairs with several hundred slides in them and some day I will get them all scanned into my computer at which point I will post them but for now you will have to accept my description of this quite scary encounter with a "mad" swan. I have some really cool pictures of him.

In Vilvorde and area I also saw the grave of some famous Flemish artist, I can't remember his name but you would know him. I think it might be Van Gough. In Vilvoorde our apartment was actually a room in a huge building and we shared a bathroom with the other apartments on the floor. One day we came home late and there on the front step was our neighbour and she was completely drunk and passed out on the step in a large pile of vomit. It was a very cold night and we were worried that if we left her there she would freeze to death but she wasn't a small lady and we were scared to carry her. First we were worried we would drop her, second we were more than a little concerned about the barf that was all over her getting on our suits and third her shirt was sliding up and she was so close to exposing herself that one wrong move on our part and it would all be hanging out. As we were attempting to decide the best way of lifting her a taxi drove up and asked if we needed help. Apparently he knew the woman and he offered to take her in his car. That concerned us a bit too but he really did seem to know her so we loaded her into his car and off he went. I really hope he did know her and he wasn't just taking advantage of drunk women.

One day we got the message from the president that we needed to move out of that apartment and get a place with our own private bathroom. We found the coolest apartment that faced right onto the main canal that goes through Vilvoorde. If you check out the map you can see the canal next to the railway and our apartment was almost directly under the ringbaan (ring highway) that forms a circle around Brussels. If you look at the map you will see Vilvoorde Park just north of the highway. In the park there is a small section next to the canal that is surround by park on three sides. We lived in that small section. We lived in a three story house but it was only about twenty feet wide. We were only paying for the first floor but the entire house was empty and we had use of the whole thing.

We taught even more in Vilvoorde than we did in Turnhout and several of them eventually joined the church. The first was a single woman somewhere in her forties. When we first met Sister Van Campenhout she completely opened up and told us about her entire life. We found out that she had attempted suicide not too long before and when we pressed her she told us that she still had a bottle of Valium just for the day that she decided that she couldn't handle it anymore. We promised her that the gospel of Jesus Christ would give her the strength she needed to get through anything and eventually we talked her into giving us her bottle of Valium. We threw it into the canal. We also taught another very large family. The Delange family consisted of the parents and kids ranging from around eight up to twenty. There must have been at least six of them. Some of the teenage girls were very pretty and very forward. The mother and several of the daughters were eventually baptized but they all loved us. I know Sr Van Campenhout has since died but the Delanges are still around and I believe are still active to this day.

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If you touch another human being it is for one of two reasons. It is either to express affection for that person or to exert control over that person.

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