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"!
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