Helsinki Center for Young Adults

This is what we do!  The Center for Young Adults is located in downtown Helsinki, in a very exclusive area of town.  None of our youth can afford to live near here so they travel up to 11/2 hours to get to Family Home Evening on Mondays, where we have 15-20 attend, and to Institute of Religion class on Wednesdays.  There are up to 50 who attend that class.  

This is the center from the street view!

Here is Elder Roberts standing in front of our street entrance.  The ground floor is the church meetinghouse rooms and we are on the 2nd level.

Here is the sign outside.  I'm not sure what it says but obviously the church's name and hours of our meetings.

This is the door on the street level to the church.  We have to use a key or be "buzzed" in to get in the doors on the left.  Our youth push a button and we buzz them in for our activities.

At the landing of the 2nd floor you can see crazy elevator on the right, and there are four doors in this small space.  Two are entrances to our Center, the one on the left is to our kitchen, and there is one door to the mission offices.

This is our main room with chairs set up for Institute class!  There are also 3 additional rooms for small meetings, and one is an office for the Institute Director.

Here is the center with youth!  They really fill the room for class but don't want other classes offered because they like to all be together.  There are 5 kids in a Missionary Preparation Class as well!

This is the other part of our large room and you can see where we have a large board for the kid's pictures.  We are in the process of updating all the pictures!

The kids hang their coats here and all take their shoes off!  When all have arrived this area can hardly be walked through.  What will happen when the snow comes????

We have to go out to the landing and through a separate door to get to the kitchen where we have dinners on Wed. and dessert on Mondays.  We use no paper products but after eating each youth take their dishes to the sink, wash them, and put them in the racks above the sink!

This is the other part of the kitchen.  It's not large and is  a challenge to serve in!

Here are the kids at our Family Home Evening Christmas party!  We had 27 attend and it was really fun.  Some kids were assigned to share a favorite Christmas song. They played it over the computer on You-tube on the TV!

Each kid brought a 2 euro gift for the timed gift exchange and it was a riot!  We all laughed so hard and had a really great time.The kids are so great, speak excellent English, are warm and friendly!  We are learning their names and they are getting acquainted with us!!!

Here is our chapel.  The chairs can be moved for activities. We have 80 -100 attend our services!  We often have visitors since we are in the center of Helsinki!  Our Sacrament Meeting is translated into English, there is an English Sunday School class, and Relief Society(our women's meeting) is translated !  "The youth are the best English speakers so they do the translating and we listen with headphones

This is the back of the chapel  and additional rooms.  They have a kitchen and 4 classrooms that can be 1 large room or divided into 4.  There is also a library and Bishop's office.

Here is our little foyer to the chapel.  Opposite is a large coat and shoe rack since people REALLY wear coats, hats, and gloves in Finland!

The Center is also used by the mission for lots of meeting, Language training at 6 weeks and 6 months into their missions, leadership training, trainers training, and district meetings that you see pictured here.  The missionaries are so cute and fun.  This day they had an apple crisp cook-off and we got to be the judges! They work really hard and love to teach the gospel!  The office will probably be moving soon out of the center of the city --we will miss seeing the missionaries and the office staff!!!

Well, we hope you have a better idea of where we work  in Finland--there will be many more  subjects to share in the future.  We love you all and miss you sooooooo much!!!