Varazđin Branch Happenings

A few updates from the Varazđin Branch...

The Church has a special music program in certain places of the world where music skills are lacking and opportunities to learn are few.  If anyone is willing to commit to learning to play the keyboard, they are given one to practice on.

Our member, 16 year old Denis was excited last year to give it a try.  He has been teaching himself for a year now and this week he played the music during sacrament meeting for the first time.  We couldn't have been more proud of him.  Hopefully, he will continue to learn new pieces of music to add to his developing skills to share with the members in Varazđin Branch.



Elder Crnich & I were brave one day and decided to take a loaf of banana bread to Seka and her family. She was the inactive member, that the Elders and Crnich's helped haul and stack her wood for her. She doesn't speak ANY English at all but we decided to give the visit a try. After meeting the challenge of the closed gate and dog, we found Seka and her husband working in the back yard.  She was excited and very surprised to see us but accepted our banana bread gift with a smile.

She immediately went into the house and returned with the traditional drink made, like-lemonade, from various tree and plant flowers in the area; they even use the leaves of stinging nettle to make one of their juices!!

We were then treated to a tour of the small garden and together tried to understand what kind of plant it was comparing the Croatian name with the English name that we were familiar with.  She uses EVERYTHING and does a lot of drying of the plants to use later on in the year.

Our task complete, and our head full of hrvaski (Croatian language), we started our exit plans to the front gate.  Seka stopped us no less than five times to give us another package of dried plants, fresh basil, chives, lavender, some leaf that smelled like vegetable soup, and several packages of the dried tree/weed blossoms to make our own juices.  All this wonderful generosity ended at the roadside, as just before she let us get into the car, she snipped off her only blossoming rose and gave it to me. What sweet people these Balkans are!