Zone Conference and Becoming Batman

Howdy folks. Sorry this email is coming in late again! We definitely ran out of time yesterday. All is good though and another life-changing week has gone by. That's not an understatement either! Every single day I can feel my growth and development as a person. Regardless of whether or not I'm having a bad day, I can look back and see God's hand in things out here and it just fills me with so much gratitude. For those of you who are still contemplating serving missions, I can say hands down that this has been the best decision of my life. It's so hard, but I have been happier than I have ever been before. I'm having all sorts of adventures and meeting all sorts of amazing people. All I'm gonna say is that I highly recommend it! 

Alright this email is gonna be fairly brief because we need to get cranking on our missionary work for the day. A lot of good stuff has happened this last week, but a big highlight was definitely zone conference for all the northern countries. For those of you who aren't familiar with the composition of the missionaries here, that's probably around 80% of all the missionaries in the entire mission. It was such a party and I was able to meet quite a few other missionaries that I hadn't yet which was awesome. I have said this before, but I'm going to say it again because that's how grateful I am for it: The missionaries here are some of the coolest people I've ever met. They're all powerhouses and legends and I feel so blessed to be able to serve alongside all of them. This zone conference was incredibly edifying and fun and was just exactly what I needed at the time. The next 21 months are going to be so incredible. We did take a big group picture, but I can't seem to get my hands on a copy that's not super blurry. Sorry bout that. I do have pictures with my MTC district though outside of 1 of the 2 LDS chapels in all of Albania. Pretty fun.

Another weird and crazy update: our district leader got surprise transfers into the mission office as an assistant to the president, so we found ourselves lacking there. To everyone's surprise, Elder Basham and I got a call from President and now apparently I am the district leader. Super crazy and cool and slightly overwhelming but that's alright. I'll learn a ton from it I'm sure! Being district leader just means that I'm in charge of checking in on the other 6 missionaries in our district, leading trainings each week at district counsel, and conducting baptismal interviews. That last one is pretty intimidating but I'm sure I'll be able to manage pretty well if I have the sheet of questions in Albanian in front of me haha.

Facebook finding works! We now have a new friend here in Gjirokastër that I found on Facebook a few weeks ago! We met in person for the first time on Sunday and had some great introductions. He speaks perfect English which is super nice and he's probably the most accomplished Albanian I've met so far (Which is saying something because he's 17). We're super excited to keep meeting with him.

For P-Day we met up with the district (and Lushnje) and saw some cool Greek ruins! Very cool stuff and there's lots of pictures I've gotten from everyone in the album. We also happened upon some communist tunnels that we decided to explore which turned out to be full of 100s of bats. We kind of disturbed their peace and getting out of the tunnels was a bunch of fun to say the least. Let us hope that the 4 of us in there don't get sick now haha. There are videos included of course.

Thanks for being awesome guys! Love you!

Photos

A Guide On How to Build Cobblestone Roads

Tungjatjeta my fan club! First off, I want to say I'm grateful to have all of you guys here supporting me out here. Any and every email or short message I get from any of you is so empowering. I just feel your love and it helps me so much. Y'all are the best.

Okay lets get started shall we? This week, again, as expected, was CRAZY. So much stuff went down and it's hard for me to even believe it all happened in just one week. One great topic of interest was exchanges! The Fier Elders came down to Gjirokaster on Tuesday and we vibed hard. Since our areas are so far apart, we usually just do a super exchange where all 4 of us just team up in the same area. Many advantages come from that. Most obvious though, is that it allowed us to do a butt ton of work which is a big bonus. One thing led to another, and at the end of the day, we ended up all in the same spot at our friend Nora's house. We had a wonderful discussion on baptism and the Holy Ghost with her and her daughter, and they ended up telling us they would like to be baptized! We have tentatively set the date for that for September 4th. Nora is definitely ready for baptism, but her daughter still needs to receive quite a few lessons so we are hoping to meet a whole bunch with the two of them over the next couple weeks. We desperately need the Gjirokaster group to grow so this is such a miracle to us. 

Some other great stuff has been going down as well. The day after exchanges, we actually had a big service project down here in Gjirokaster where we helped a bunch of workers build a cobblestone road! Very cool to learn how that is effectively done. It takes a lot of time and hard work and I have gained a great respect for those workers. We spent the full morning shoveling, moving big rocks and sand up and down this road, and even chipping/placing stones in the road. I thought it was super cool and now we have gained the skill I suppose. In the words of Elder Waite: "I feel like if I was alone on an island with a good hammer and some conveniently sized rocks, I could build some pretty good roads." Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of anything so I've only got a couple from Elder Basham, but at least we have something! Another great benefit of this big service project is that we had a whopping 12 missionaries in Gjiro. It was quite the party to have 8 Elders in our one apartment the night before and I'm only growing more and more grateful for the awesome missionaries we have here. 

Other than that, we've just been hard at work with the most random things. We've done a whole lot of official meetings for potential projects for the church charities and that has been a little rough for me. My brain comes out of those pretty fried. But, we might have helped get some really nice projects lined up for the people of Lazarat! We could potentially be funding them in the building of a new childrens playground which is super dank. If that goes through, you will definitely be seeing pictures of us homeboys helping out. 

And now, very quickly I will share the events of today. We have been doing so much travel and exploration outside of our city that we figured it was a good time to do some self-guided castle touring. It did not disappoint. This castle has everything. It has an abandoned prison from communist times, a gun museum where you can just pick everything up and *safely* play with these antiques (we had fun as you can see in the pictures), multipurpose ancient giant aqueduct swimming pools, a bat cave, tanks and cannons, and even a good ol Shqiponjë flag. Definitelt gave me Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade vibes. There was old 1940's looking technology left there and everything. We spent quite a few hours in there exploring and learning about the history of Gjirokastër. It is such a cool spot in the world! It has been an area of intense conflict for pretty much all of its written history. Especially the past 150 years are super cool. For any of you that randomly decide to take a vacation to Albania, I highly recommend the castle and museum in Gjirokastër. It's a grand total of 7 dollars for full access to the castle and the guns hahaha. Totally worth it!

Peace out guys!

The weekly album of legend

NASCAR Driver In Training

Ç'kemi? 
Si je?
Si jeni?
Si kaluat?
Si kalove?
Si ke kaluar?
Si keni kaluar?
Si po kalon?
Si po kaloni?
Si ke qenë?
Si keni qenë?
Ça ke bërë?
Ça keni bërë?
Ça bëre? 
Ça bën? 
Ça po bën? 
Ça po bëni? 
Ça bët?
Ça bërët?

If you don't know what I'm asking, don't worry. The answer is always "mirë".

Okay so this week was a little bit whack for sure. It went by so unbelievably fast and I honestly don't even really know what happened. It was definitely hard to stay focused at times this week, because Elder Basham and I had multiple visits to the hospital *still* trying to figure out what is wrong with his feet and hands. We think we finally have got something today, but we will have to see how this medication does. Things would definitely be a lot nicer if we could just focus on our work. 

With the lack of focus aside though, this week was good. We did have almost every appointment we had fall through though... A little disappointing, but with how things work here our appointments are always pretty tentative anyways so it wasn't that bad. We spent a lot of time trying to get creative with our contacting this week due to our lack of focus and also weird schedule. We've actually been working on a video as an ad for our English course which will be dank once we finish that up. Keep your eyes peeled on my Facebook for that one. It'll be a gem. Something else we briefly tried was finding a place to sit along the street and loudly studying Albanian together. This way, we are killing two birds with one stone. I get needed study, and curious people will ask us what the heck we're doing and why my Albanian is so bad. It's a good thing all around so we will definitely be doing more of that. (Dixon you're a pal thanks for the idea) I've also spent a good amount of time attempting to do some Facebook finding. I've made a few (sort of) friends here in Gjirokastër and I've been talking to them on Facebook messenger. It's a lot easier to talk in Albanian over messages which is nice, but if all goes well, we will be meeting in person, and that is what I'm nervous for haha. We're hoping to get some of these guys to our English course or just a regular meeting/lesson. Updates will come if there are any. 

Since most of our appointments fell through this week, there is not much to say on our current progressing friends. Our beloved solo member here in Gjirokastër (his name is Dritan and he's the best) is so dank. We see him often and he has decided that he does not care to call me Elder Millsap and just calls me Jakob (pronounced ya-kob). I think it's dank. Also, while I'm talking about it, I have new tags incoming titled "Elder Milli" since, turns out, Albanians can't say my name. I've gotten approval for this shortened one picked out by our good friend Nuriela (who we also didn't meet with this week sadly). We also didn't meet with Nora which was super sad, BUT we are planning on meeting with her tomorrow and actually setting a baptismal date with her which is SUPER dank. We are in desperate need of a closer community in our church group and more support from people other than the missionaries. Updates to come. 

Now for the title. Driving here is my favorite thing ever. It is literally so much fun. I found out I was cleared to drive last Monday, and I have been doing it every chance I get. Everyone drives like a maniac and it's awesome. I really do feel like a race car driver with all the crazy passing and things we have to do on these roads. Also roundabouts are hilarious. I'll have to take a good video of a roundabout in Tirana and share it with you all in the future for you to understand. Also speaking of driving, today we went on another great and beautiful adventure around our large area. This time, we decided to drive up the west coast between Sarandë and Vlorë. It was probably one of the most beautiful drives of my life. On one side you have these giant rocky mountains, and on the other side you have the coast and all these random beaches scattered throughout. I've never been able to see the ocean (or I guess the Mediterranean in this case) clearly from so high up before and it was amazing. Many pictures were taken for your enjoyment. We also received a dank referral from some of the Tirana sisters this week for a dude in Sarandë that wanted a book of Mormon, and we were able to meet him today and get him one! His name is Afeis and he wants to meet with us weekly and we are stoked for that. 

If you've made it to this point I suppose it's only fair that I explain that all the questions at the beginning are all different ways of asking "how are you". It's pretty ridiculous and it's fun to hear a new one basically every interaction. 

Anyways, love you all and God bless you! Keep in touch and keep on becoming awesome people!

Photos

The Littest Mission

So sorry I didn't get this email out to you guys yesterday! Things were crazy and kind of still are. So, you all are receiving an untimely email from yours truly. For those of you who aren't familiar with the time zone difference, it is Tuesday morning for me at the moment. :) 

Alright homies let's get right to it. So much more has happened in the last week. It's been quite the adventure for us down here in Gjirokastër. Let's get right to the title though shall we? Albania and Greece are literally burning. The fires have been going pretty much since I got here, but they have gotten progressively worse over time. Last Tuesday, there was a large fire very near to Gjiro, and so President and his wife had us evacuate to Vlorë and stay in the empty elders apartment there for a night. Super wild adventure because we left Gjiro after 9 PM and Vlorë is 2 hours away. It kinda worked out well for us though we suppose, because we just had district counsel in Vlorë the next day until we got the clear to head back to our area. I also got to see another beautiful area of the country, because Vlorë is a city right on the coast of the Adriatic. In fact, in our travels we discovered that I've been to almost every area in the 2 Albania zones already in my first 2 weeks here. I only need to visit Shkodër, Elbasan, Berat, Pogradec, and Korça. I have now met the majority of the missionaries in the mission which is super dank. I love how tight we all are.

Let's talk about some missionary work stuff now, shall we? We had some really awesome experiences in the last week that I'd like to share really quick. The first of which is this nice old lady we met in the upper city last Monday night. We were walking back to our apartment at about 9 to get to bed, and we pass by this lady sitting in front of her house. As per usual, Elder Basham and I said hello and also good night, but in my incredible Albanian skills, I accidentally ended up saying good morning. This got us all laughing and this lady ended up starting a good conversation with her. Before we knew it, it was 30 minutes later and she had invited us to come visit her in her home at any time whenever we were passing by again. We took her up on that offer a few days later, and were able to have a wonderful visit with her where we got to know her a lot better, and gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon. She immediately started reading from it and asking us questions. She is such a sweet lady and we are hoping to have a full lesson on the restoration and history of the church with her sometime this week. 

Let's talk about the fires again for a second. After getting back to Gjiro, we took a couple journeys up into the villages around us to see the damage and look for service opportunities. We ended up happening upon 2 different government officials working on helping with the logistics of the damages of the fire and we got their contact info! We are hoping to get in touch with them and outline some big service projects for us and maybe even get the church charities involved in meeting the needs of the families whose homes and property burned. Updates definitely to come on that!

Now a quick rundown of P-Day yesterday. We actually had to drive all the way up to Tirana again because I had some embassy work to do for residency and Elder Basham had a doctors appointment for his feet and hands. We drove up Sunday night, and got back home late last night. It is a solid 4 hour drive one way and so we have put a lot of kilometers on our little vehicle in the last 2 weeks. But, the best part about going to Tirana, was that we got to meet up with other missionaries and socialize. I am a very social person and in only being able to effectively socialize with one person these last couple weeks, it has definitely been quite the challenge for me. Just being able to talk to the Elders and Sisters up there was such a party. At one point we even got a bunch of us together to play "Bang!" and that was super dank. I sincerely love all of the missionaries here. Definitely another reason why our mission is the littest of them all (not to mention our mission president is super cool and we get many privileges that other missionaries wouldn't even dream of).

Really quick before I wrap up, here is a little bit on the mail I can receive. The postal system here is whack, and so it is very hard for me to send anything home (not impossible though so it may or may not happen). Basically I have to use the post office in Tirana 4 hours away to send anything, so it won't happen often. But, the good news is that I can still receive anything from you all. Here are the addresses for both packages and letters:

Packages:

Adriatic South Mission
Jacob Millsap
P.O Box 2984
Bulevardi "Gjergi Fishta"
Qendra "ALPAS"
Shk Nr 5, Apt Nr 14
Tirana
Albania

Letters:

Adriatic South Mission
Jacob Millsap
Bulevardi Gjergi Fishta
Nr 5
Apartmenti Nr 14
Tirana
Albania

It is critical that the address says "Adriatic South Mission" otherwise they won't know who to get it to. 

I hope you guys are all doing well! Keep vibing wherever you're at in the world. I love you all and remember you can always reach out to me if you ever need anything. :) 

Photos from the week

We Are Starting a New Church

What's up guys?! I have finally made it to the beautiful country of Albania. It is quite the place, that's for sure. I'm still adjusting to the culture and the time zone difference... All is good though! Oh yeah, and remember those 9 weeks I spent in the MTC? Turns out all that language study was pretty much for nothing because I definitely can't understand anything. Oh well, I'm just grateful that I'm here to be completely honest. "Avash, avash" (Slowly, slowly) as everyone is telling me. I'm learning to be a more patient person but it is at times hard to feel like I'm just a companion for my trainer so that he can do the real work without breaking the rules. I definitely feel the pressure to figure all of this out soon though so that I don't feel as useless, and also because I'm in an area that really needs some help haha.

Speaking of my trainer and my area, I'm being trained by the one and only Elder Basham. He's dank if I do say so myself and he's been a great support to me over the last 6 days or so since I got here. He's been out in the field for about 14 months and he speaks the language beautifully. I'm just a little bit jealous of that fact, but it will come with work. We are assigned to work in Gjirokastër which is one of the coolest places I have ever been to in my entire life. The city is basically built up the side of a mountain and all of the roads lead up to this giant castle that overlooks everything. When you get up closer to the castle too, all of the buildings and roads are completely made of stone. It's crazy beautiful and I'm super stoked to continue to become familiar with it all. People call it the most ancient city in Europe. I don't know if that is true or not, but I will own it for now because its dank as flip.

Anyways, this area has only been open in the mission for a year. It is only myself and Elder Basham serving here, so it gets a little lonely at times. We have a grand total of 1 active baptized member of the church here in the city, so we don't even get the privilege of having a branch. We lead a church group that consists of us missionaries, our one member, and whatever friends we have in Gjiro that we can convince to come and join us. Our church building consists of one singular room. Very dank. Any prayers for our success here (and my learning of the language) would be much appreciated!

So much has happened since we landed in Tirana last Wednesday and I could type out several paragraphs if I wanted to. Turns out, I don't want to do that today so you guys are going to get the short version. Elder Basham and I didn't even get to Gjiro until Friday night if that helps any of you to imagine how much went down. It "sufficeth me to say" that to sum it up, I have eaten some amazing food, tried to catch up on the much needed sleep after our 24 straight hours of traveling, driven many hours across the beautiful country of Albania, met many super dank Elders and Sisters serving here (very stoked to continue to meet and hang out with more of them), tried talking to people in Shqip with little success (because I literally don't understand anything that comes out of their mouths), met lots of dank Albanians, ate more really good food, and got settled into our apartment. Many stories are within and I will let you all use your imaginations (and the pictures).

I have been almost completely convinced that this is the best mission in the world for several reasons. One of which, is the fact that we can use the mission vehicles to travel around on P-day. Today, for our wonderful day of weekly preparation, we went on a little bit of a road trip actually. We almost made it to Greece, but President told us that was probably too far, so that adventure will have to wait for another time. Instead, we hit two random dank castles, one of which was on it's own little island in the Adriatic, and also hit the cities of Ksamil, Sërandë, and Delvinë which was super dank. We got to hang out on the beach for a second in Ksamil which was super relaxing. Got a little bit sunburned too, but that is actually a blessing in my mind right now after having been stuck inside my house for 9 weeks straight. Many pictures have been included in the link below for all of you to enjoy. 

I think that is all for now folks! I promise I'll share some more specific stories next time when I'm not still completely overwhelmed with everything that is happening. Keep vibing and don't be strangers!

Pictures