August starts with a bang!!

As most of you know, for us, August started with the Eastern European Young Single Adult Conference that Andrea and I had been working on so hard for the last seven months.  The final count was 183 Young Single Adults attending from twenty different countries.  Add in instructors and senior missionaries like us and we had a total attending of 203.  I've always done a posting for each entire month but this posting will be just for the conference.  The rest of the month will follow in an additional posting later.

This is the beautiful setting for the conference.  The area is called Dobogókö.  It's a mountain resort area and it has this fantastic view of the Danube River bend.  You can make the river out as a stip of blue in the middle of the hills in the far distance.

People started arriving early and we really had to scramble for a while.  These are mostly Hungarians.

These young single adults (YSAs) are from Romania and Moldova, except for the cute girl with the pink bandana on.

So, we got busy with registration.  There's that cute girl again.

I'm in this registration picture but you're going to have to play "where's Waldo?".

So, what did the YSAs do at conference?  They ate.

They had firesides

and institute classes.

They played games.  Andrea's in charge of this one.

They had learning activities.

Did you ever do this 'trust' activity?

They had lots of service project opportunities.

Many of the service projects were done in the nearby village.

This and

this one are at a school.

Some of our numbers stayed at the hotel and made quiet games for children.

Some knitted loom stocking caps to donate.

Andrea oversaw the committee in charge of service projects.  Here's a quote from her:  "I've had a dream for years of being in charge of a Mormon Helping Hands project."

More stocking caps.  Winter is coming and you can't have too many of those.

They took hikes.

The area has a lot of beautiful trails.

They did crafts.  These YSAs are making copper jewelry. 

Fabric bead bracelets are being made here.  Andrea is posing with the only attendee from Albania.

They practiced dancing.

Because we had a dance every night.  The dances were very good.  Just ask the neighbors who called every night complaining about the noise.

                     

Of course, dances means refreshments.  Mostly fruit and drinks. Here's Sister Smith and Sister Adams cutting up watermelon.

And why not?  An Elvis impersonator from Austria.  Just imagine Elvis with a German accent.

There were some folk dances demonstrated.  I think these four are Slovakian.

But these pretty girls are Hungarian.  Both of them were members of our committee.

Could it be?  Yes, it is the Macarena.  Hungarian YSAs love it almost as much as they love 'Cotton Eye'd Joe'.

I had to put this picture in because Andrea looks so nice with all of her young friends.

Here we are with two other members of our committee.  They actually got married two weeks before the conference so I suppose the honest count would be 181 Young Single Adults.

We didn't get to be together a lot of the time.  We had different duties.

I was actually gone a lot of the time making trips back and forth between Budapest.

Well, here's a shot of the whole group, or at least everyone that we could get together on the final night.  They're a lot of amazing young people and the destiny of the Church in Eastern Europe depends on them.  We expect this event to have been the highlight of our mission in Hungary.