Christmas and the Mississippi Delta

Hi Y'all

What a wild month we have had. We have talked with all of you but I thought I would list some of the things so I wouldn’t forget anything:-)

Many of the members of the Church here in Mississippi and Louisiana did special things for the missionaries this Christmas. Some of the members of the Madison Ward invited 10 of the local missionaries to a surprise Christmas party the Saturday before Christmas. They had contacted the missionaries’ parents for baby pictures for an identification game and got the recipe for their favorite dessert which they made and presented to them after a ham and turkey dinner. There were gifts under the tree for each elder and home-made stockings filled with goodies.

After church on Sunday the 24th, we visited four of our neighbors and took them our usual homemade granola and wished them a Merry Christmas. They looked at us very strangely as if the neighbors had never done that before. The Smiths (the Baptist minister) invited us in and even said that they should have come to see us first. It wasn’t like the fun time we have doing it in Oregon. After our visits, we drove to Hattiesburg to stay the night in a motel on Christmas Eve. The next day we drove down to Gulfport for a ZDM meeting with the missionaries. At this meeting, a new District Leader Training session was held an hour before ZDM Meeting for the District Leaders and their companions taught by the Zone Leaders. This will be a planned meeting each ZDM Meeting to help train the district leaders and their companions in the responsibilities of their assignment.


At the beginning of the meeting in Gulfport and Hattiesburg the missionaries played carols on our chimes and had a gift exchange. After the usual training by the Zone Leaders, Mom served lunch and Sister Paskins had made crochet stockings for each of the missionaries filled with candy. She and her husband made all the desserts that were served.

It was an unforgettable Christmas and it was actually great! Being with the missionaries made it easier to be away from all of you.

Sunday December 31st 2006. New Year’s Eve in Mississippi. Mom and Dad spoke in Madison Ward on Making Choices and Keeping Commitments. Thus brings us to the end of the Fuhrimans’ first six months in the Mississippi Jackson Mission. The missionaries love and trust Dad, and they know he loves, respects and cares about them personally.

We have found the missionaries to be dedicated to the Lord and very easy to love, and we feel they are getting stronger and doing better. This is a great time to focus and rededicate our efforts in furthering the Lord’s work here in the South. Plans to motivate the missionaries and strengthen the wards and branches are in the process of being implemented. The missionaries here in Mississippi are truly the ELECT and we love them!!!!

New Years Day found Dad and I pretty tired and ready for some down time. We took down the tree and put away Christmas. I’m afraid I filled up most of the storage space upstairs because I did purchase some decorations.

The year started out great with the baptism of Latishia and Craig. She sent in for a Book of Mormon from off the T.V. The elders took the book to them and then started to teach them. Eventually the office couple (the Richardsons) took over the teaching in the evening. Latishia and Craig don’t have a car and the Richardsons could help them get to church.

Your dad and I went to teach them one evening. They live in a tiny motel room with a hot plate to cook on and a small apartment refrigerator. She works all night at the desk of the motel to pay for their room, and he is looking for a job. We were so impressed with their desire to learn the Gospel and become better. She “loves her book” (the Book of Mormon) and she has used it so much it is tattered. They have a child that is being taken-care of by her mother while they try to save money to get on their feet.

This is the couple that the Richardsons taught about fasting and committed them to fast on Fast Sunday. They started their fast after the Saturday lunch meal and then when the Richardsons went the next night to teach them they found out that they were still fasting. They said they were waiting to know when it was okay to eat because it was important to them to do it right so the Lord could bless them. Isn’t that great? What FAITH they showed. They fasted over 30 hours!

We had a little wedding for them on Jan 5th at the Branch Building, with a flower girl, some food and pictures by Sister Fuhriman. The next evening they were baptized. They are loveable and teachable and the Lord is surely smiling.

I have to send in a record of the mission history for the last 6 months we have been here to the Church Archives. A poem I saw on a bench at the Atlanta Aquarium comes to mind:
History is written by those who make the wake,
Not by those who ride on it,
Not by those who watch from the shore.

It is surely true as I write about the things that have happened here in the mission the last 6 months. We are surely not sitting watching things go by...Sometimes I wish we were.

The senior sisters were telling us about a 13 year-old boy they were teaching. One of his non-member parents didn’t want him to join the Church. He told them that he was the same age as Joseph Smith and that he had prayed like Joseph Smith had prayed, and he knew he was supposed to join the church. His parents are thinking about it.

Every time we go to the Madison Ward here in Jackson I love to see what Sister Aker is wearing. She reminds me of my mom, Grandmother Day. She has a beautiful hat to match every suit she wears. She wears all colors, purple, yellow, green and even red with touches of black. Her husband has a tie the same color and it often matches exactly. Your dad was complimenting them on the fact that they match, and she said that “they always plan it that way”.

The weekend of the 12 and 13th we were at Stake Conference in Hattiesburg and then for Zone Conference that week. Both your dad and I had to speak Saturday night session of Conference and then the Stake President took us out to dinner at Letha’s. It is a restaurant started by a black woman named Letha. She was there – she is over 90. All of the waitresses take your orders by memorization. They learned to remember orders because originally they didn’t know how to read and write. That is not the case now but they have just carried on that tradition. There are very few choices but the assortments are wonderful. Barbeque ribs, chicken and pulled pork are the main menu as well as catfish, hush puppies and they even have a very good green salad.

There are lots of pictures on the wall of famous people that have eaten there and they have a signed Brett Farve jersey. .(Around here he is idolized because he went to Old Miss (I think).

When we were speaking at the Stake Conference in Hattiesburg, the person that spoke before us told the following story. She said that when John Wesley went to Oxford, He was having a hard time being part of the world there. He couldn’t handle all of the drinking and partying. He wrote a letter home to his mother telling her he was not sure what was right or wrong and she wrote him back saying,

“When you judge the lawfulness of pleasure, take this rule:
Whatever weakens your reason,
Whatever increases the authority of your body over mind.
Whatever impairs the tenderness of your conscience
Whatever takes away your relish for things spiritual
Whatever obscures your sense of God
That is sin to you….No matter how innocent it may be!”

This is great counsel to follow – especially to teach the children.

We are having two investigators and the missionaries that are teaching them over for dinner and a lesson tonight. It is always a special treat to have those investigating the Church come to the mission home. We enjoy learning about their lives.

Saturday the 27th, we are hosting the Jackson Branch Presidency here for dinner. They are great men but it is hard being in charge of a small struggling branch with so many inactives.

We will be speaking in the Hazlehurst Branch on Sunday. It is located an hour south of here. Dad was there when they dedicated their building but I wasn’t able to go so this is the first time for me to visit there.

Tuesday starts Zone Leader’s Council and Departures and Arrivals. We have 15 new missionaries coming and two of them are sisters. With this transfer, 60% of our missionaries will have been in the mission for less that a year….that makes us a very young mission.

We were up in Greenwood speaking last weekend. It is about 2 hours north of Jackson. We drove up early Saturday afternoon and went to the cotton museum they have there called Cottonlandia. They have an exhibit that shows the time-line of the county and the military History and the impact of all the wars on the area beginning with the Civil War. Greenwood is located on the Yazoo River and an area of the town is totally surrounded by rivers. They have used dikes to keep the Mississippi River from flooding the area.

This area of Mississippi is called the Delta. It is mostly agriculture but lately they have started to raise catfish on large “farms” and then processors ship the fish all over the world. They have displays of huge cotton bales and lots of old machines – They have the oldest sewing machine I have ever seen.

The name of the town comes from Greenwood Laflore. Leflore was a political leader of the Choctaw Indians in the mid- 1800s and he was also a Mississippi State Senator. We got some “Dixie Dishes” recipes and we purchased a “boll of cotton” and some seed so we can grow our own cotton.

DELTA DISH RECIPE FOR THE MONTH:
FRIED CATFISH

The fish are cleaned, salted, and rolled in cornmeal. Fry them in deep fat in an iron skillet until golden brown. As one piece browns, remove and put another in. This maintains an even temperature of the fat.
Serve with “Hush Puppies”. This fare tastes best when cooked and eaten beside the stream where the catfish were caught.

Did you know cotton is the only plant that produces both food and fiber?

There are really interesting names down here, such as: Ctula (pronounced Tula), Toom Sooba, Itta Bena and Boobaluna, Mississippi and Smackover, Arkansas. They even have a 300 page book dedicated to the origins of the names of the towns in Mississippi.

There are a lot of different churches here – AME Church stands for African Methodist Episcopal – there a lot of them in small towns or out in the country.


We have a new sister coming into the mission. Her name is Crystal Perry. Her father grew up in Oak Hills Ward. Remember going and visiting the Perrys at Christmas? It is their oldest son’s daughter. She doesn’t remember us because they moved right after her dad died and then her mom remarried Chuck Hanchett. What a small world!

On a billboard in the town of Clinton (where the Stake center is) there was the following saying:

Be THANKFUL for the past,
Have COURAGE for the present,
And FAITH for the future

We love all of you and hope you are all happy. We remember you all the time in our prayers. We know you all have challenges in your lives and we can remember when we were in you places…..We all need to remember the above adage.

Love, Y”All,

Mom and Dad