So this was kinda a crazy week for sure but I'm pretty sure every week is crazy here! Anyway to start with some questions to answer: No, I have not been able to go to the base yet I will be going on Thursday, and yes Elder Holm has been to the base a few times. The zone leaders went this week and we asked them to bring us back root beer and we have had root beer floats almost every day (America!!). Elder Holm has actually been in every city in Kosovo that has been opened (there are only 2 right now, used to be 4) but it wasn't in a row, he kept switching from Albania to Kosovo. And I still have 2 months with him, you have to remember our transfers are 12 weeks not 6. The work is very slow out here. Our whole district doesn't have a single real solid investigator, lots of street contacting and lots of first lessons. We bond with the branch pretty dang well considering there are only like 20 of them max and that is counting the 5 little kids. We don't eat at their homes or anything like that though ever. Usually if we meet with them we meet at the church because they don't want people seeing that they are having Christian missionaries in their homes for safety reasons. The food is good here... Big turkish influence lots of doners and stuff. They do have more European influence than Albania so you can find stuff like oreos here if you know the right stores which is awesome. We can leave the city to go explore on P-Days but it has to be within reason and there are areas we are told not to go. The zerg area in Prishtina I talked about last week we try to spend as little time in as possible because we just get weird vibes and stuff but other than that there aren't any places we aren't allowed to go. The people I'd say are a little more open after Ramazan but not like a huge night and day difference. Yes, members do worry about being a part of this church and some of them have had things proven that they do have a reason to be. Some of them get harassed at work and stuff so most of them don't tell anyone they get baptised, even their family. That is also why we now have missionaries guard the door to the church on Sunday. There is a little danger, nothing crazy but they do have to be careful being members here. That definitely wasn't a problem at all in Albania like the worst of it I saw was their family was super disappointed in them and sometimes estranged them but never danger or anything!
Anyway to start of with last P day I had my interview with President Wiedmann and I used it way better this time. I actually asked him some questions and I learned some really cool stuff from him! He is just such a spiritual guy and its crazy how well he can answer our questions.
Also this week I went on an exchange with Elder Kek who is actually from Layton (Caleb's hometown) and he is pretty sure he knows Caleb which is pretty cool! He also played for their ultimate frisbee team there so we had some fun talking about frisbee and stuff! He is a pretty cool guy but I was happy to get back with Elder Holm! I'm gonna miss the big guy when he leaves!!
A cool spiritual experience I had this week is on Tuesday while I was preparing for District Meeting I was really struggling and couldn't put my thoughts together about what our district needed and what I needed to talk about and it was really frustrating me. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted to talk about I just couldn't put it together. So I just said we should go to the church and get everything ready and hopefully it will come to me and so we got there and I started writing up everyones numbers and what our goals were and it just totally came to me what I needed to talk about and when I thought about it all the plans just totally came to my mind instantly and it reminded me of the scripture about how if something isn't right we would have a stupor of thought and if it was than we would have clarity and I definitely know that is what it was!
Something less good is how bad our week was work wise. We didn't get very many lessons at all.. (3) and I was just pretty down about it and Friday was especially bad. I was just in a super weird mood and frustrated because I wasn't sure what more I was supposed to do! We planned 2 lessons at least every day and the people just kept not showing up! So basically Elder Holm and I sat down and we were like ok we have to change something what is it. So we decided we just needed to put like 100% effort in and just contact like crazy the next day.
So then Saturday morning we got out there and holy cow. The blessings just poured down! So in the morning we were just out for an hour and a half and I got a pretty good amount of numbers for that time (3, my record for a whole day before that was 4) but Elder Holm went absolutely insane, he got 11 numbers! Literally every person he stopped gave him their number and it was blowing our minds like no one ever does that! It was a super cool experience for us and now we are loaded with new people to meet with next week!
So the weird sorta sketchy experiences of the week are number one we have been handing out english course fliers saying that we are doing an english course and there is the church logo in the bottom corner and some people got mad at us saying we were deceiving people into saying we are teaching them English and then we teach them about our religion. For me it's like dude this is literally a free service we are doing if you don't like it just don't come. But some people get super mad. This one guy started like cussing at us and about the church in English saying that they were brain washers and he walked up to us super pissed and there was this surge of adrenaline that went through me and for a split second I was seriously like alright lets do this but we ended up talking him down.
We also had a car full of covered women (covered women are super normal) pull over and start talking to us and one of them waited in the car who was like fully covered like except the eyes (not super normal) and they were talking to us about Islam and were pretty respectful and stuff and recorded us for part of it which was kinda weird but we didn't really feel threatened. The interesting part was after Elder Hydrick (the senior missionary) was like could you tell the fully covered one was a guy or a girl and we really couldn't so that was kinda something that I had to think about and be more careful with I guess.
Also two people I realized I never told you about who are key to the Prishtina experience are Betim and Suad! This two guys are mid 20 year old guys who are both really smart (mechanical engineer and architect respectively) and speak perfect english and they seriously just hang out at the church and chill with the missionaries all the time! Unfortunately Suad has been having some personal safety problems so he has been having to stay away from the church recently but he is super funny. Betim used to play professional futbol in Italy but chose school over that. He is dating another member here in this branch and is basically the hope of this area. The problem is he is still a 20 year old guy and so sometimes he isn't the most reliable in responsibilities and is kinda immature which is normal but the problem is so much is riding on him in this area it's just hard. He is so fun to hang out with though I love him!
We went tracting for the first time on Sunday and man I remembered why we didn't do tracting. Like maybe it's more effective in other areas of the world but here it's pretty much a great way to waste time! We tracted for 2 hours and only got 2 numbers and they were just like 20ish year old girls so not a lot of chance they are going to end up actually meeting with the sisters (that happens a lot). There are just so many more people ready to talk to us street contacting and the ones not really interested don't waste our time like tracting does! Also the buildings we tracted were so sketchy! There weren't lights for a few levels at a time and it got crazy dark like couldn't see!
Anyway that is my week in the crazy world of Kosovo I hope y'all are doing good. I'm really expecting we will have a better work week next week so keep your fingers crossed for me! Definitely seeing blessings and miracles almost every day though which is just awesome! I love being a missionary! Also apparently tomorrow is my 6 month mark for being out on my mission which is crazy! Any who have a good week I love you all!
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| America! |
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| Inside a Mosque |
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| Our fliers for English Classes |
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