To start off here is a haiku I wrote in Albanian when I was super bored waiting for a member to finish training herself on our computer at the teaching center (kind of a weird long story that I won't get into)
Dje ishte mësim
Nesër ka ëndrrat tona
Sot është mrekulli
What a great week it was. It had quite a lot of variety which spiced things up for us real nice. Lots of good lessons came from all sources with little and big miracles sprinkled throughout. Very grateful.
I mentioned this briefly last week, but we had an exchange in Pogradec on Wednesday! That was a fun experience to say the least. There *cough* were 4 Elders there and they are a force of nature. They are easily so of my favorite missionaries out here and they get some great work done. Honestly, I think I learned more from them as their zone leader than they learned from us. It was a great final hoorah for Elde Garret as well. He goes home tomorrow after having served a very successful mission. What an incredible man. He definitely sets the standard high for all of us other missionaries. Anyways, the exchange was awesome. Pogradec is in the mountains on the shore of a big mountain lake called Lake Ohrid. It kinda gave me bear lake vibes actually not gonna lie. Because of this, it was quite cold in Pogradec. They didn't have snow when we were over there, but I think they might now. It is one of the few areas in the mission that consistently gets snow throughout the mission. Super hype because snow is the best. Another fun fact about Pogradec: tons of people use wood burning stoves to heat their homes so come 4 o clock or so when it starts getting dark, the smoke in the city is so thick you can see it everywhere. The smell made me miss camping a little bit too... Very good stuff. To wrap up our exchange in the evening, we played a great game of Catan so you can know it was a super fire exchange for sure.
After getting back from Pogi, we needed to do some work to renew our car registration. It ended up becoming quite the hassle because neither I or elder Rowley knew what was going on at all. Anyways, while we were doing this car work, this young kid comes up to me and starts begging for money. Being used to this, I ignored his question and started some basic small talk with the kid. Within just a couple minutes we were basically best friends. He brought over his other friend (who initially asked for money as well) and introduced him to us. As we were walking back to our car as well, these kids ran up to us and asked us if they could show us a church that was nearby (since we had mentioned we were volunteers for our church). Being pressed on time I was hesitant to say anything, but eventually I agreed and we followed them down into a really ghetto and poor neighborhood. They showed us their church, which turned out to be protestant, and got barked at by a dog when the kid tried to open the church gate. Well, right next to this church lives this nice family with like 5 kids or something (that's very significant in albania). We started talking to these super cool kids and I also talked to who I believe was their mother. All of them were very friendly and told me that the church was shume keq and not good at all. We talked to them for a while explaining our church and everything and why we were so far from our families and all that, and eventually realized we needed to get moving so we promised to return one day to visit. Hopefully we can find time for that visit sometime this week because God for sure led us to them through the beggar kids.
Sad news: our sisters are being taken from us and Elder Rowley and I will be left alone to manage the city of Elbasan. Transfer calls came in again on Friday since we've got quite a few missionaries going home this coming week and to everyone's surprise, they separated all of the elders and sisters into different areas. Our mission seems to have a reputation for missionaries falling in love for some reason so that might have something to do with it, but either way, there are now no elder/sister areas. The areas that have multiple companionships now either have 4 sisters or 4 Elders. Pretty hype actually and I hope I can serve in one of these Mega elder areas in the near future. I'm I'm hoping they end up moving Elders into Elbasan because it might prove a little difficult to balance our ZL work with the attention and time our area needs. Another bummer is that there are things that the sisters definitely can do that we can't and they are certainly better than us in a lot of other things so we will have to step up our game big time without them. Updates to come as I continue to try and figure out this area haha.
Language update: things are looking up but also slightly more stressful. We have a senior couple that's comes to the Elbasan branch and so we as missionaries need to translate for them. Sister Satterthwaite is a legend with the language so she has been translating sacrament meeting and Sunday school for the both of them. Well she is leaving now and therefore elder Rowley and I will have to do it. Elder Rowley will probably take it for the next little while, but when he leaves who knows who will be coming into the area, so I'm guessing the baton will be quickly passed to me. Elder Rowley didn't want to translate yesterday in priesthood so I tried to do so and kind of failed miserably. Poor Elder Booth probably only got 20% of what was said translated for him. Live transcription, as it turns out, is very difficult so I will be working on that a lot in my language studies so that I can do a good job for them in the future. Tune in next transfer to hear from the transcripting legend Elder Millsap (I'm hoping if I say that it'll give me a little extra incentive and that then it will actually be the case here in a month).
Anyways, that's probably about all for now my good friends and family. The only other thing of notice I'd say is the Mega soccer pday we had today. There are a ton of missionaries in Tirana because of transfers and I think we literally had 30-40 missionaries in one place playing soccer/football. Very wild but I don't think I will be getting those pictures because we have some forgetful missionaries in our mission haha. If they happen to be in the album when you open it, that's your treat I guess.
Merry early Christmas everyone! Enjoy yourselves! Love you all!
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