Wow. What a year. It's hard to believe that 2022 is upon us already. It's also weird for me to think that for most of 2021 I was a missionary as well! Pretty strange stuff. Time is not what I thought it was to say the least. Anyways, I'm super hyped for this year while being a missionary 100% of the time. I fully expect it to be the best year of my life because these last 7 months as a missionary have easily been the best already. I imagine that as the language becomes more natural and I put more experience under my belt that it's only going to become even better. 

We had a great week as well. We've got some great potential baptisms coming up which is always super exciting. It's just amazing to see the change in people as they choose to make such a powerful promise to our Lord and Savior. Updates to come on that as we teach them. One of the candidates is actually a 9 year old boy from an inactive family here in the branch. They are such a sweet family and we're really happy to be meeting with them. The other candidate is a friend of the sisters that actually got passed onto us. She met with and got all of the lessons from the sisters here in Elbasan a few months ago and was even on baptismal date. However, she left to attend a program called "Cumorah Academy" in the Czech Republic for 3 months. It's a program that is heavily run and endorsed by the church, so she was able to meet a lot of really great members over there and learn a lot about us. She has come to sacrament meeting a couple times already and we've met with her once since she got back and she is awesome. She is 100% ready to be baptized and I have no doubt that she will be. The question is whether or not she believes she is ready for baptism yet. Updates to come on that as well! We are so excited.

New years was an absolute blast. We had the Elders of Gjirokaster, Fier, and Lushnje come stay with us here in Elbasan for the night and we received permission from our mission president to stay up until 12 to experience the new year and the fireworks! Having 8 elders in one apartment is definitely a party by itself, but throw the Albanian new years experience on top of that and you've got some real life-long memories. I've seen some big fireworks shows in my life, but nothing compares to how spectacular this display was here in Elbasan. I've probably even seen fireworks displays with more fireworks, but those always come from the same place. Here in Albania, somehow everyone has massive fireworks and they're lit off with no regulation all across the city. It's kind of concerning actually but I think that the fact that 99% of everything is concrete makes it a little bit less of a fire hazard. It is truly incredible to stand on top of the roof of our 13 story apartment building and look out all around us at thousands of colorful explosions. Some of those explosions actually happened pretty close to us which kind of surprised us haha. We were all in complete awe the entire time. Also on a side note, before we watched the fireworks, we had some really dank games of "BANG!" going on which was super fun. Love the amount of board/card games we play out here in our evenings especially when you've got a large group of Elders in one place for 8 hours straight (we were asked to be indoors by 4:30 in order to avoid the potentially dangerous partying that was happening).

Elder Rowley dies in a week which is sad. We'll get transfer calls this weekend and I'll find out who's replacing him then. We've had some really quality and weird experiences here serving together in Elbasan. Definitely a transfer to remember. Here's to one last week with the homie!

*As an extra treat this week I included a couple videos I had previously submitted to the mission's variety show into the album. Ju befte mire*

Photos

Sorry the pictures are basically just new years lol that was definitely the highlight