Visiting a fairy-tale town in Estonia

For your possible interest, here is a report (including a video) about Sister Sharon Eubank and the all-Finland LDS women’s conference on the campus of the University of Tampere for which she was a principal speaker on Saturday:

“Sister Eubank Speaks at National Women’s Conference in Finland: Outreach meetings held with humanitarian agencies”

I was briefly there at the conference site on Saturday morning.  One of the principal organizers of the conference was Dr. Raija Pini Kemppainen, who is, if I’m not mistaken, the Relief Society president of the Helsinki Finland Stake of the Church.  Scott Gordon and his wife and I stayed at the Kemppainens’ house for the past four nights — though we were all so busy that we were only briefly there, and seldom came back until late at night.

I have been either traveling or staying with the Kemppainens in their home since Friday, and have had no access to the internet except very sporadically and briefly (e.g., when sitting in a Latter-day Saint chapel prior to a fireside).  Now, though, I’m sitting in an airport hotel, waiting for an early morning flight to Amsterdam and on to Salt Lake City.  So I’m going to try to catch up just a bit, on this blog and on other things.

We were up quite early on Monday morning for a two-hour boat ride across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki, Finland, to Tallinn, Estonia.  (By “we,” I mean Wayne Crosby and James Miller, of the Church’s Historical Department, who are collecting oral histories from Latter-day Saints in eastern Europe; Scott Gordon, of FairMormon, and his wife; Jussi and Pini Kemppainen, our hosts; and me.)  Upon our arrival, we were met by the president of the Church’s Estonia District and Elder Tarmo Lepp, an Estonian member of the Third Quorum of the Seventy.  With them, we visited several areas of historical significance for the Church in Estonia and walked a bit in the Old Town section of Talinn, which is very beautiful, almost like a fairy tale.

In the evening, Brother Miller and Scott Gordon and I spoke in the Church’s beautiful new chapel in Talinn.  There were, I would guess — I’m terrible about such things — roughly sixty people in the audience.  (I’m terrible at such estimates.)  Our remarks were translated into both Estonian and Russian, as both languages are represented in the Church in Estonia.

Posted from Helsinki, Finland