Peja

October 26, 2015

Ok so this week was COLD! Dang I was not expecting to have the cold hit as hard as it did here! Depending on how this holds up I may be buying some thermals to make it through this winter here! Definitely bad call not bringing any. It also rained like non stop for 3 days straight which was no fun! I don't have my notes with me so I'm sorry I just am suuuuppperrrr bad at remembering stuff that happens during the week without them so I'm going to try my best!

  So as I said on last Pday we were in Peja so I didn't have a ton of time to write you guys but it was really good. We actually got to meet B's family and that was super cool. They made us a bunch of traditonal food and it was so good! The Hydricks came and were super nice and the family loved them so it was really awesome for them to have a first contact with the church even if they didn't recognize it as that! Peja is such a beautiful place I really hope it reopens soon! 

  This week President Wiedmann told us that we should go try tracting some specific apartment buildings here in Prishtina so we went and did it and had some crazy success. We went with the other elders and just kinda split up and we ended up having 3 lessons and getting 5 new investigators!! It was honestly crazy! We had a very successful week so definitely counting our blessings! A lot of our return apointments with them are tonight so hopefully we can meet with them all again because that would be awesome!

  Also this week I have been feeling pretty sick which has been rough but I definitely have seen the Lords hand in the work helping me because I seem to always have just enough energy to work all the way through the day and then I just come back and crash super hard. It's like all during the work in the day I don't feel horrible but in the mornings and evenings I've been pretty rough.

  Being able to teach B. as a member has just been awesome this week! When someone goes from being an investigator to having the Holy Ghost they just take off in the church, it's so ballin! He and I gave talks on Sunday so all week we were helping him prepare for his talk and he put so much work into it! Like looking up all these talks and mormon messages and stuff! His talk was so good too, he rocked it! Everyone in the branch thinks we are the best missionaries ever because we baptized him! It's just crazy because we really did nothing! 

  Also I didn't too bad on my talk myself! I'm including this not to brag but just a change I've seen in myself. Like before my mission I really didn't feel like I was very good at giving talks first of all, and second I had to write all of it out so that I could have my thoughts in order before I got up and just talked but I decided to try to just go for it and see what happens by just studying and selecting some scriptures and bullet points and honestly I did super well! I was really happy about it. Just another awesome thing that happens as a missionary which I think has 3 reasons, number 1, I'm way better at talking about gospel topics and stuff like that in general now, 2 I'm way more confident now, and 3 I'm way more in touch with the spirit! It was just a cool experience for me to have, definitely no fear about giving talks anymore!

  Something kinda crazy that I've been seeing this week is how important the gospel is by living it through B. So first of all I really think I'm going to be friends with him for the rest of my life! I really just like him as a friend, plus we are the same age. But anyway he still hasn't told his family yet that he got baptized, but is thinking about doing it this weekend but the thing is he might lose all family support and everything when he tells them. Just seeing how much faith he has and how he realizes this gospel is more important than everything to him is just awesome. I'm really worried about him so I'll let you know if he does it this weekend. He just has such a fire right now it's awesome!

  Anyway next week is mission conference so that's going to be awesome I'm sure I'll have some sweet stories from that!  Elder Mero is also doing awesome and is now starting to get a pretty good grip on the language which is sweet. 

  Love you all have a great week!!!

Beautiful Peja!

B's baptism!

October 19, 2015

Hey all we finally made it up to Peja! Therefore I have no time to email but I sent all the pictures from B's baptism! !  (I can't post the pictures of the baptism but Adam and B are beaming with BIG smiles! :))

The baptism was amazing! I was stressed out the whole day trying to make sure everything was perfect and there were of course a bunch of things that went drastically wrong but it all ended well. :)
 The moment I got into the water with B. it was just like the spirit just filled me and everything became so peaceful. It was my first time ever baptizing someone and it was amazing. The spirit was soooo strong in that moment wow! I had to baptize him twice but that's ok haha no beginners luck! His testimony was so awesome after! He blew everyone away! 

Other than the baptism not a ton of crazy stuff has been happening. Our days have been literally full of lessons that we have planned but we maybe get one because they just don't show up! It's so annoying! 
I also went on an exchange with Elder Kek! We are the missionaries who have been serving the longest together up here in Prishtina! It was fun being on an exchange with him. Missionaries always say that the North Zone makes missionaries more relaxed (that's both good and bad) and it's suuupppper true! 

Also I don't know if you have had a chance to see these but the church released these videos called 12 steps to change and it's about addiction and they are super intense but super amazing! They are on the mormon channel and I would highly recommend watching them! Just shows you how powerful the atonement is! 

Anyway sorry I don't have a ton of time to email but I'm doing awesome! Feeling a little sick but that's alright! Love you!

Picking Potatoes! :)

October 12, 2015

 So this week we started off heading up 2 kilometers away from Serbia! A member called us and said he wanted our help with some service and said we were going to be picking potatoes so we all started driving over to his place following his son and we thought it was going to be kinda close but it ended up being super far away and up through all these crazy roads but it was awesome to get out of the city! 

Also I can now officially say I have picked potatoes and can be a true idahoan.  I never picked potatoes in Idaho and who would have thought I'd be doing that in Kosovo?!  The service was awesome but honestly I think my favorite part was the drive there and back, just driving through these mountains and country sides it was so beautiful and kind of reminded me of home a couple times.

This week  a lot of people were watching soccer games...it's huge here!  Sadly, Albania lost to Serbia but then they beat Armenia and made it into the Europe cup!  There was a huge parade though the city after that and fireworks!

  Something pretty interesting and fun this week has been teaching Albanian. Since Elder Mero doesn't know Albanian super well, especially grammar, we just started from the beginning and it's been pretty fun and really good for me! It's so crazy because he doesn't understand any grammar principles or anything but just automatically uses them when he speaks.

  This week was zone conference which of course was awesome! Something that I loved from it was that they told us we should literally ask to get a referral from everyone we meet and to set goals for how many referrals we wanted to get. It's something that just hasn't really happened a bunch in this mission and so it's been super cool to do now. So far we haven't found a ton of success at it but I really like doing it. So even people we just street contact we ask them if they would have any friends interested. And our zone right now is just sooo fun! Like we are just absolutely stacked right now! 

  Once again the Lord showed me that it was His work not mine.  So after zone conference we were planning on going to our house when a random guy showed up and said that he had been taught by missionaries before and wanted to get taught again!  It's just so crazy like we stand out in the rain (it was raining for half the week) for a whole day and nothing really happens, then randomly the Lord just gives us work like that!

  Honestly I've just been seeing the hand of the Lord in our work a ton. Everyone says you see extra blessings while your training and it's suuuppperrrr true. We got 23 numbers a couple days ago all in one day! That was insane! I also got to teach my first lesson to a family because they let us in when we were tracting so that was super awesome! 

  Also B. will be getting baptized on Friday so that is awesome! Then Saturday and Sunday we are going to be watching general conference! B. is soo excited it's awesome. We taught him about church history this week and stuff and he just loved it! I seriously like can't believe how perfect he is. I'm so excited for his baptism! Plus it'll be in a portable font which I always wanted to do!

  Anyway I love you all! Stay awesome! 

Picking potatoes in Kosovo!

Prishtina Elders

Driving to the farm...

Teaching Elder Mero Albanian

Kosovo soccer uniform

Albanian soccer uniform

Parade through the city to celebrate the win.

New trainee

October 5, 2015

Hello all this was a pretty packed week this past week but it was awesome! 

So basically we wake up super early in the morning on Tuesday and head to the mission office and when we got there and it was so weird. It just kinda hit me that Elder Holm and I wouldn't been companions anymore and it was kinda sad. I love that kid to death and we had some good times. 

Then I get hooked up with Elder Wright and we head off to Durres for a couple days while we are waiting for all the trainees to get here. It was super weird being in Durres for a couple days. It was kinda like a pause on my mission like it wasn't last transfer but it hadn't become the next transfer yet. Durres is great and all but man I feel so blessed to be in Prishtina right now!  Also in Durres they were closing two missionary houses so pretty much all I did Tuesday and Wednesday was help move crap out of houses and deal with all of that so we didn't get a ton of real missionary work done, but Elder Wright wanted to finish it all before he got his trainee so he wouldn't have to deal with it then.

    I got driving privileges this week!! They weren't going to give it to me this early in my mission but I was the only one down there and the Prishtina car had to get back up so they had to give them to me! WOHOO! Man driving is so fun I freaking love it! Especially here! It's like super lawless here but basically you can just drive however you want and people will work with it! It's so cool! I hauled getting back to Kosovo from Tirana it was so fun!

  So anyway finally Thursday rolls around! We get to Tirana and all the trainers are there and we had a meeting before we met the trainees which was really good - just kinda talked about ways that we can help them and stuff. It was also great because everyone training right now is awesome! It's nice now that I have been out here for a while to know a lot of the missionaries and I feel like I have real friends out here! It makes meeting up with other areas way more exciting!

  Then all the trainees come in and sit down and everyone is so nervous and excited you could probably have felt it in the air! All the trainees are so tall! I think one of them was taller than me actually! But anyway we get through a meeting and talk about some stuff and then President is like "Ok we are going to start from the north!" So I got to be the first to know who I was with which was awesome! and...... I got the Albanian kid from Canada (Elder Mero)!! He's pretty awesome! We had a 4 hour drive back up to Prishtina just to talk and it flew by because we talked the whole time. He is so much like Grant it is insane. His style is a ton like Grant and he skates and the music that he listens to and just all that stuff. The funny thing is he is actually only like 1.5 years older than Grant too (18). It's seriously like living with my little brother again! 

So both his parents grew up in Tirana and are Albanian but they moved to Canada so he has grown up in Canada but is Albanian by ethnicity. He speaks Albanian alright, but his family doesn't speak it in the home so it isn't perfect or anything and so we are able to help out each other because I know grammar way better than him but he knows a lot of words that I don't. He also was baptized only a year ago so he has an awesome flaming convert testimony and is super helpful in the way that he has an idea of what it's like to be an investigator. I'm super excited and think we are going to get along super well!

  Other than all that the rest of the week was pretty normal. It's funny seeing all the things that Mero does that I remember being like as a trainee. We haven't been able to get into the full swing of things quite yet because there have been chores we are taking care of and getting him moved in and stuff but we were able to get some missionary work in. It was actually really awesome. Last night we went tracting and had a ton of success! We weren't able to get in any doors that night but we got a ton of numbers. Lots of people say that when you have a trainee you see a lot of miracles and I totally feel like that was a big part of last night. There were some apartment buildings that I just felt super guided to and we would go and people were just so friendly! 

B. went home for the weekend and went to church in Gjakova.  Luckily there are some super cool missionaries there so he got to talk to them and really enjoyed it!  Next week we are going up to Peja with him!!  Right now his baptism date is set for Oct. 17th.  That's when we're suppose to watch general conference as a branch so we'll see how we can work it.

  Sadly I haven't been able to see much of general conference or anything but I will be watching it with the branch in 2 weeks so that will be good!  Other than that just trying to catch little bits of it here and there!

  Things are great!  I'm excited for my new companion.  So, more (pronounced More-ay) in Albanian means dude or bro so we always call Elder Mero more. :)

  Anyway have a great week! I love you all!

My day in Durres

Durres

Selfie!