Winter is Coming

Our dear family:

We have had a rather pleasant fall here, but now it is cooling down. Temperatures this week will be in the mid-forties during the day and down to freezing at night. The city turned the heat on this week (it comes in hot water pipes from three power plants on the outskirts of the city) and we are almost too warm in our apartment. We open our windows occasionally, but the air is quite dirty so we keep them open very little.

Linda has been ill for a week with what appears to be flu; I have had a light touch of it as well. Our mission president is also ill and told me a couple of days ago that half of the missionaries are sick as well. The air is bad now, but will be really bad as it gets colder. There are hundreds of thousands of people living in gers and small wooden houses on the outskirts of the city and the heat from the power plants does not reach them. So they burn soft coal or anything else they can find to keep warm. I am told that the air gets so bad that you can barely see your hand in front of your face. Josh and Kim will fare much better: their school and apartment are on the side of a mountain south of the city where the pollution does not reach them.

We had our first meeting with our public affairs council and advisory board Friday night. They are a very good group and the meeting went well. We will have training with them by the Asian public affairs directors from Taiwan on Wednesday of this week. Then we will meet monthly with each group. The Church does have a good image here generally, but there are some people in government who need to know more about us. We had advisors from the Mongolian president's office to President Andersen's home for dinner on Thursday evening. One of them attended the BYU symposium on religion and law last year he other will go this year. Both are quite impressed with the Church and what we are doing here.

I continue to find more of our missing missionaries and will present my search and re-activation plan to all of the branch presidencies in their monthly meeting with the district presidency on Thursday. Then I will go to each branch and meet with their branch council and speak in their sacrament meeting. We will appoint a returned missionary representative in each branch who will report to me weekly on the progress in each branch. I will drive north to the Darkhan District on October 11th to do the same for their district and branches.

Linda, Joshua, Kimberly, and I had dinner with an old friend and his family at noon in their home. His name is Peruserven, and some of you know him. I first trained him in Utah in 1996 for our Consortium of Universities here, then saw him off and on when I visited Mongolia. He and his family all joined the Church. He has been a branch president and CES director. His son is at BYU-Hawaii following a mission in Idaho; his daughter just returned from BYU-Hawaii with a degree in communications. She has a boy friend from Colorado and it seems serious. Peruserven is on our public affairs advisory board; he also slept on the couch in the house on the Big Island when so many of our family was there.

We spent a couple of hours with our artist friend Tsegmed yesterday; and, now, we have two of his very fine paintings hanging on our wall. He is painting two more for us, one of Monument Valley the other of edge of the Gobi Desert.

We appreciate so very much the e-mails we receive. Please, all of you, write as you can.

Also, please visit mother. I talked to her again this morning. She appreciates nothing more than visits from family.

We love you.
Mother and Dad