It took me a week but I recovered from the shock of all of my siblings getting married. I mostly just laid in bed all week switching between crying and eating ice cream. My companion had to sing me to sleep some nights but I'm all good so you can all stop worrying. You really bond to your companion when he has to sing you to sleep.... It actually hit me a lot harder than I thought it would. I knew it was coming but the reality of it just hit me last week and I was a little taken back for a little. Ky eshte jete.
Alright missionary work. This week was a little slower lesson wise. We just a lot of stuff fall through but on the bright side we have 4 baptismal dates and we taught all of them the Word of Wisdom this week and they all accepted it. Everyone smokes here. Imagine Mad Men but the poorest country in Europe and thats what you have. There are bar lokals here which are just places to go get drinks and everyone here just goes and drinks coffee and smokes with their friends so it's a really big problem here but luckily for us most of our investigators don't have a huge problem with it and completely understood the reason for it. They are set for the 14th of March. It was going to be the 7th but we have stake conference that weekend and we will all be going down to Tirana so They wouldn't have got the holy ghost for a week and we decided to change it.
This was our last week of english course then we advertise it for a week and open it next week. I love english course flier season!!!! I told you guys about it last time and i'm so excited it's. We literally just walk around all day and hand out fliers to everyone!!! Most missionaries hate it but it is so much fun and it's exciting to see the response we get. I redid the flier today because it was two sided and it cost way too much money and it was way to busy so we wanted to redesign it. People don't read half of it so you want to get as much info in as little words as you can. Oh i'm so excited. So grateful Elder Ostergaard showed me the better way to do it. Man you learn so much useful stuff on your mission.
During weekly planning this week we got a call from Franc our member and he told us to come down to this activity and we had no idea what it was but we thought we should go and check it out. We went and it was the opening of a bar lokal ( don't worry not a bar like you're thinking it's different here. I"m not a terrible person I promise!) but it wasn't just that it is a bar lokal with a radio station in it and a youth center. Not a hundred percent sure exactly what that all entails but we went and they were doing a little press conference with the Minister of culture of Albania and some other people. There are a million bar lokals here and they are all the same. Communism has made made everyone here complacent. But this one was sweet it had hanging lights and they had different styles of hats as the light covers and they whole ceiling was papered with newspaper and they had a bunch of old books on these wooden shelves and the floor was old wood look and they had some cool stencil spray paint pictures on the wall. It was sweet. Anyways we were there and there are a couple Americans here from peace core and one was there (note he has a sweet beard) and we started talking to him and he had connections with the event and he does a bunch of activities here and we just talked to him a little and he just told us how he needed connections before his work was effective and just about some stuff he did. If I could do what he's doing I would totally join Peace core but he has a very unique position because of his schooling so we'll see. I'll look into when I get back. but the whole thing got me super excited to do things with business and have events and connect with people when I start my business and everything but not the point. While we were there we talked about if it was an effective use of time and we decided that it was good for people to see us at a public event rather than just standing on the street so they would be willing to talk to us. So we stayed for a little then decided to leave and go finish weekly planning. It was just a really cool experience and hopefully we can organize something with the guy from peace core.
We have been thinking a lot lately about working in a more public manner and we've been thinking lately that we need to have more activities because we need to get the church more known here and get people coming to the church and people like activities so we had a meeting as a district on saturday and discussed it and we are going to be doing a lot more activities here and trying to get more people coming and getting a touch with the church and missionaries. On Saturday night we watched Ephraims Rescue and we got about 20 people to come. It was the first time and it was a pretty good turnout and it definitely brought the spirit. That movie has a good message and a ton of stuff that needs explaining if you're not a member of the church. But we watched it and that was the start of our activities. We want to watch the Joseph Smith movie and 17 miracles the next couple weeks and we finally found a place in the city where we can play soccer and we want to play frisbee and flag football and stuff because it's new and people will like it. We figured doing activites is a lot more effective than contacting so if we can organize activites and get people to those we hope to find a lot of people through them. I have a quote by my bed that says " if you want to achieve a goal you've never achieved before you have to do things you've never done before". We need to change the way we're doing missionary work up here because the church has been open for 8 years and not much to show for it and we are doing to do work up here.
The last thing is we had President Ogeliu who is the second councilor in the stake presidency come up and speak in sacrament meeting and gave the sunday school lesson. Another month where I prepared a talk and got skipped. The first talk was given and then he just got up after the song and starting giving his talk. I was actually pretty excited about this one but he gave a very good talk. It was really good to have someone from the stake come up because if the stake isn't on our side and doesn't know what's going on nothing will ever happen. It was very good and he talked about some things that were very good for our members to hear and opened my eyes to not being relaxed on some things like how our members dress and such. Often I think it's "ok" because we're so new and they need to worry about other things but if they dont' learn today they wont' change tomorrow.
Other than that life is just peaches and cream ( mostly peaches cream isn't good for you). I love my companion. I love my city. I love the gospel. I love all of you. Keep this crazy country in your prayers. Elder Szabo
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