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!
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