Patagonia x Cotopaxi Collab of Destiny

Hey bros! Miss y'all. Hope everything has been going ne rregull for all of you. So, if you were to look at all the emails I've written so far as episodes in a tv show, today's email is kind of going to be one of those annoying filler episodes. Sorry bout that but lowkey nothing too crazy ka ndodhur as of late (or maybe that's just how it seems now that I've had so much crazy stuff go down haha). Oh well, let's get right to it then.

I guess one item of interest was that we were in Tirana on Tuesday! We wet up to do embassy work for Elder Cannon. Very fun stuff. I got to spend half the day hanging with good old Elders Qose and Rich while our trainees were all gone. On top of that, because I was at the mission office waiting, I was able to have my regular interview with president in person. So awesome. I love in-person interaction haha. Because Tirana is so far off as well, we got to stay two nights in Lushnje before and after the embassy which was sick. We love spending time with the boys.

Couple items of business: First off, we lost 2 members of our district temporarily. Super depressing lowkey because they're sick. The Vlore apartments power is out and the landlord can't figure out why, so after a week of trying to figure it out, they finally decided just to move the Elders to Berat temporarily. Elder Fairbourne was our lovely district leader, so now that he has been removed from the district, the duty has been slapped back on yours truly. I'm not complaining though because lowkey it's pretty fun and it gives me plenty of opportunity to connect with the district (which is pretty much all new by the way) so it's good stuff. We also fixed our church wifi and our washing machine this week which is also a big accomplishment for me with the language barrier and all.

Overall, this week was a bunch of random work that got done and all is good but it does make for a boring email. Sorry about that.

I did however get some custom made patagonia x patagonia shoes. Picture is included of course. Gotta say my marker skills are not great but I'm proud of and impressed with what I have accomplished with this. 

Also Harry Potter is lit in Albanian.

Y'all are sick paqe jashte ka qene e vertete vellezer dhe motra.

Photos

The Italian Job *but without mini coopers :(*

I am so happy to be writing an email again you guys. This last week was one of the most stressful of my life, but we have made it through and there is a lot of light at this end of the tunnel. Sorry to have missed emailing last week, but as I'll explain in just a second, I was unable to write one last week (nor did I really want to because a lot of crap was going down haha). So today, I will be catching you up on the events of the last two weeks because lots of changes have happened!

First off, last week was my last week with my trainer Elder Basham. Knowing that it was our last week, we planned a ton of stuff out. We ended up organizing a super dank service project in the archeological site "Antigonea". It's an ancient greek and then afterwards roman city that is still being uncovered about 30 minutes away from Gjirokaster. Anyways, after a pretty wild goose chase trying to find whoever was in charge of the volunteers for the work in the park, we were able to secure a 7 hour service project uncovering an ancient city. It was super dope. We even got our good friend Arli to come with us which was awesome because we bonded a lot with him. We got to work with this big group of Italian students and their professor as we found ancient pottery and tiles and such. Super cool stuff. A few pictures are included. Most of the time we were just moving leftover dirt while the experts worked, but I did uncover some really cool pieces of pottery myself. Definitely an experience only to be had in this part of the world as a missionary. Kinda a flex for sure. It was pretty fun to interact with all of the Italians as well because they got to practice their English on us. Good times.

Fast forward to two days later - we receive transfer calls. Elder Basham was told he was being transferred to Korca to train again and I was told that I will be training here in Gjirokaster! Super exciting and I was totally expecting it to happen but it hit me like a brick wall regardless. Definitely brought some stress upon me, but it very quickly became the least of my problems. 

After a good chill P-day playing soccer in a kalceto and bruising my foot because I was playing barefoot, we were on our way back to Gjirokaster. Because I had hurt my foot, I was just icing it sitting in the passenger seat. The last 2 weeks or so have been really wet out here in Albania. We've been getting a lot of rainfall and it was no different last Monday. Because of this, the roads were fairly wet and therefore slippery. We were about 35 minutes away from Gjirokaster on a mountain highway when we started hydroplaning, lost control, and spun off the road into a cement bank and barrier. I've had some pretty unexpected and terrifying moments in my life, but few compare to how it felt to get in such a bad accident. Miraculously, we both walked away perfectly fine other than the fact that I had hit my head hard enough on the door column to leave a gash (which was soon discovered to be no problem at all). I highly recommend avoiding getting in a car accident, but I especially recommend it outside of the country. The legality of the issue was so complex. We had to wait for the police to get there to do all these weird measurements and drawings for their report, and then we were able to get a tow truck to take the car away to Gjiro. Once we were done with that after about an hour or so on the side of the cold road, we ended up just riding with the tow truck guy all the way back. To drop the wrecked car off in some garage. After getting back to the house, we decided we had better go the the hospital to make sure my head injury hadn't caused any real damage since we were still running off of a lot of adrenaline and possibly in a little shock. Well, we made one fatal mistake there. We should not have told the medical professionals that we were in a car accident because the policy there is that they immediately called the police again. They then proceeded to not even check my injury, take my blood, then put me in a wheelchair and hauled me to a CAT scan. I had no idea what was happening and I was very hesitant to get on the machine, especially after realizing I was most likely completely fine, but I did so anyway and got some cool pictures of my brain. The doctors determined I was alright and so they let us go, but then the cops kidnapped us and took us to their office in Gjirokaster. The reason for this is that in Albania, you don't have the right to release liability or anything like that. Because I had been injured in the car accident, Elder Basham became completely liable for harming me and so we had to fill out tons of paperwork in case of a potential lawsuit. It took around another 3 hours and we didn't get home until after midnight. Not to mention that they also took a bunch of Basham's must-have items including his driver's license and lejim i qendrimi. To say the least, it made transfers the next day much more difficult for us and for everyone else involved. We had to take a bus up to Tirana with all of Elder Basham's luggage and we arrived a good 2 hours late to transfers. All worked out well though because we've got the best president and AP's known to man. 

Since Tuesday things have been much better but still a little hard. I was on splits on Wednesday and Thursday with Elder Fairbourne in Vlore which was good for me for sure. I was able to distract myself from all that had happened by serving there and spending time with him and with the Vlore sisters. However, things were still a little complex and fun because somehow the power to the Elders apartment in Vlore had been cut and so we went without electricity for a couple days. We had to get creative in order to have warm showers to say the least. Elder Fairbourne is awesome though and we did have a blast.

Thursday we meet our trainees in Tirana and I am training Elder Cannon! The guy is such a homie. He's got 3X the vocal volume of all the other missionaries combined and so it makes things pretty fun. It's been bothering a lot of people, but personally I'm having fun with it. He's been pumping me up a lot and his enthusiasm for the mission is super fun. Some of my favorite phrases from him include: "aaaaaayyy kinda dirty/kinda stinky", "gotta build that equity yknow" "not gonna lie man *followed by the most random phrase*", etc. He's super fun haha and I'm stoked to spend the next 3 months with the guy. 

I'd also like to say real quick, that the gift of tongues is becoming more real for me than ever before. I was very worried about having to train in an area that needs so much good time and attention with my limited language abilities, but since getting back down to Gjiro with Cannon I've been continually blown away by how the language seems to just come to me right when I need it. Words and phrases I've barely learned or used seem to just come and flow out of my mouth as I'm speaking to the people of Albania and it is so humbling. I know there is absolutely no way I would be able to communicate as well as I have been without divine help ad assistance. The more time I spend out here, the more difficult I realize this language is which makes it even more incredible that I'm able to pretty much run the church here in Gjirokaster. I am so incredibly grateful to know that I have Christ on my side assisting me as I'm out in such a foreign place. 

There is so much more I could say to you guys, but I'll leave it at this for now! Know that I am now completely fine and recovered from any really negative affects of the accident and I'm stoked to be able to continue the work with no distractions there. I love you all so much! Live every day to the fullest because you never know when someone or something will leave your life. :) 

Jave te mbare!

Week 11 Photos

Week 12 Photos

Conferenca e pergjithshme and VELLEZERIT E ZOTIT

 I hear that it's a good idea to start off the email with something interesting to get people hooked, so I figured I'd immediately let you guys know that my companion got really sick with whatever I had last weekend on Thursday and so we were out of commission half the week... Kind of an oof but we had an amazing week regardless. The work goes on even if we cannot hahaha. 

FIRST OFF, there are 3 members of the church here in Gjirokaster now (including our most recent baptism). The very first baptized member was baptized just over a year ago by some very legendary missionaries that pretty much opened up the area. He is this super cool guy named Kosta. The not so cool part about it though is that two weeks after his baptism, he blocked all the missionaries and disappeared, going completely inactive. Super sad, but after a while he began opening up to the missionaries that came in after, until now, we actually sat down and met with him with our trusty very active member Dritan! We had dinner together and it was the ideal situation. Dritan got to know him pretty well and HE started extending invitations for Kosta to come back to church. Literally such a legend. Kosta, as far as I could tell, actually expressed some real genuine desire to return and he tells us he'd really like to make the time to do so. We will keep working with him on that, but for now, we are just happy that we have contact with him again. Hopefully we'll be able to meet up with him and play some good ol futbol or basketbol. Once brethren of the Lord, always brethren of the Lord. This guy has been forever affected by the gospel and that is even more clear to us now as he's starting to open back up to us. We are beyond happy and we are praying heavily for him. I'd like to invite you all to do the same and join us in our efforts. Prayer has so much power!

Another cool thing: Facebook Finding is actually legit stuff. I am one to really value in-person face to face interaction, and so to be completely honest I don't love sitting down and doing Facebook finding. I kinda have to force myself to do it. Anyways, this week I decided I needed to switch it up to keep it interesting for me, so I joined this big group of 4000 members here in Gjiro. Once I was accepted into the group, I continued to make a post explaining who I was and that I was here solely to help and serve and befriend the people of Gjirokaster. I also told this giant group that if they had any sort of service opportunity, to reach out and hinted that I also need help with my Albanian if they wanted to assist. The results were astounding. I had dozens of comments on the post alone (some of them very strange mind you) that were awesome and I also received several private messages because of it. We now hopefully will have some good service volunteer work going on this week and we ALSO have a new friend because of it! This guy texted me wanting to meet and help with my Albanian, and we ended up meeting him in person at the church yesterday and having a great discussion with him. He's a super cool guy and knows a lot about every religion which makes the discussion very open-minded. Super helpful stuff. Anyways, we hope to continue to meet with him. 

GENERAL CONFERECE WAS DANK! I actually have yet to watch the last session still because it was streamed as I was asleep Sunday night, but that will come. We actually have permission to watch it all together at district counsel this week so we will probably do that. Our district is a party so it'll be super great. Each conference I'm continually impressed at how inspired all of the speakers are. These are truly messages for all of us for our day. They are inspired men and women who love us more than we can even understand and they want us to thrive. I'm looking forward to finishing conference up and continuing to review those talks. If you didn't get to tune into all of conference, I highly recommend it. I'm not sure what the talk was called since I haven't had a chance to go back and review anything yet, but I really loved the talk given by Brad Wilcox and of course, our prophet Russell M. Nelson. Those talks were incredibly powerful. They both had a presence that forces you to get on the edge of your seat and really listen. Super good stuff.

P-Day was dank today. We went on a beautiful hike up a mountain called Mount Cika along the west coast of the country. We didn't make it all the way since it was super steep and 6 km, but we still got some amazing views and hiked through the clouds so that was good. I have missed hiking so much and I am definitely going to try and take advantage of the fact that there is some amazing stuff the hike here. I'm hoping I have a companion one day that will wake up at 4 AM with me to go peak a giant mountain. Fingers crossed man. We also returned to Dhermi! We went there back in like week 3 or something and it was gorgeous. It was still that way, but this time, they were no tourists! October is definitely not tourist season so we had the entire beach to ourselves. Super nice. I have decided I love rock beaches and I highly recommend those as well. I believe I've got some pretty fire pictures for you all if you wanna check that good stuff out. 

Love you guys! Keep it up! As Tony Robbins says, "LIVE WITH PASSION"!

Photos