Glowsticks are dank

Howdy yall. I procrastinated writing this again and now I'm very tired after a long day. We are doing this highlight thing like I did last week and I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. If any of you have a problem with that please contact your bishop or stake president. 

- helped build a fence

- helped make honey comb sheets for bees

- Dank exchange with Elder Koch and also Esquivel with his son in Elbasan before they got transferred out to Vlorë :'(( already miss those guy. Our stacked district will not be the same without them.

- all of us Elders in the district have started an emotional resilience course which is cool

- met another referral this week and this guy is sick. He makes pizza, is 20, and has lots of deep life questions. I think we are getting him a bible. We walked around lushnje twice with the guy. Pretty dope dude.

- Had a scary meeting/lesson with a very flirty 26 year old girl who has genuine interest but it's hard to not feel uncomfortable sometimes. Having sister missionaries is a blessing that we do not have here so we'll have to figure out how to move forward in this situation.

- Worked in a finished greenhouse and ate some bomb peppers

- Allergies

- We scrambled to get a talk and second hour lesson ready for church Saturday night while cleaning and forgot we had a meeting and ended up having to do it the next day which in turn led us to starting church 10 minutes late. Imperfect leadership what can I say

- We've got a good handful of members who have committed to going to the temple in September who have never been before which is so awesome! I'm stoked for all of them.

Story time because pday was sick today. A couple weeks ago, an idea was presented by the legendary Elder Koch. This idea was accepted by all of us of course and so we found a place to buy glowsticks and then did so. Flash forward to today, we traveled to Berat and hiked to some old communist military tunnel/caves. Very cool. We pull out my speaker that looks like a BMW grill that I inherited from Elder Rowley, start playing some dank Albanian music, and then we get to cracking and shaking some glowsticks so they were all ready for us. 5 minutes later we were all covered in glowy glowstick goop looking really fresh while we continued to light the cave up so it looked like a bunch of green, yellow, and blue stars. Very very very fun. Got a cool group of missionaries here. It was a relief to shower later on though gotta say.

Anyways, love you all! Hope you're all thriving. Sorry I have been pretty bad at responding to any emails recently but I promise I have seen them! Crossing my fingers I remember to respond next week to all of you because I appreciate you very much. 

Hajd hajd shendet

Photos

Logic Bashing and a Beach Funeral

I'll make this quick and let the pictures/videos speak for themselves this week because there sure are a lot of those. It was a fun and eventful week for sure. Here is a summary of some cool stuff that went down:

- We found avatar the last airbender in Albanian so we are allowed to watch that on pday now 

- We had zone conference again and I got a lot of pictures with a lot of good friends which I love and appreciate. 

- Had a day long exchange with the Berat elders while my companion left me to go to Korça for residency stuff. 

- Some of our branch work took us to the beach actually and so we took a nice walk barefoot and found a dead ray and so we named it Gëzim and had a funeral for it. Also dank sunset.

- Elder Skene and I sung in sacrament for our Easter program because there wasn't a lot else we could do to make it seem like a special occasion besides having an Easter lesson in second hour

- We got to have a "discussion about our religions" with a really devout Muslim in a mosque on Sunday afternoon. Very cool but it definitely put my Albanian to the test. He was very practiced and had a whole structure to the interaction and everything. It couldn't be called Bible bashing tho because he made the Bible as well as the Kuran off limits since we don't believe in each other's books so we talked religion based off of logic which was very strange but I will never forget it

- for pday we went to a trampoline park, played football ⚽️, and had a movie night all in the one day. Also we had a branch presidency meeting so it was productive as frick.

- our house might be haunted

Love you all! Paçit javë të mbarë!

Photos 

Greenhouses and a Sick Donkey

Ayooo sorry it's been a couple weeks again. All I can say is I decided to sacrifice writing this email last week for a very special someone (you know who you are) so I'll have to catch each of you up in this one. Honestly everything significant has happened in this last week anyways so it totally works out. 

First and foremost BAM we had transfers again and BAM I'm still here in Lushnjë. I'm gonna be here a while so I hope that's not a surprise. And what a lucky man I am now because I'm serving here with my boy Elder Skene! He is one of two elders in the mission that is shorter than me so I actually, unbelievably, am taller than my companion probably for the first and the last time hahaha. Its definitely a special experience! It's been fun too because the guy is an absolute dawg. We've been spending a lot of time goofing off and talking about important things like lego star wars and avatar the last airbender. We've got a good mutual support system thing going on while we work here alone in this wonderful city. I expect he'll stay here for a couple transfers at least so I'm sure you'll hear a lot about the weird stuff we do together. 

Anyways, events. One of great significance was that basically 90% of our time this last week was given in service to a member here. We have been working on her farm, specifically on her cement/rebar greenhouse structures as she's working to get them re-covered with plastic so they can be all functioning again for planting this year. This meant that we took a bunch of cloth scraps and wrapped/tied this stuff around the rebar up in the air while standing on boards suspended between the rebar. It was super fun. We spent every full day that didn't rain out in that fshat wrapping those bars and we got cooked because nobody had sunscreen. So, as a result, Elder Skene and I have now absorbed about a bottle and a half of aloe vera into our skin. My skin has honestly never felt healthier and now I've got a nice tan. Gotta love it. 

I also made a friend. Her name is Majola and she is a donkey who is very sick. I mean that in a literal sense. She has snot constantly hanging from her face and a lot of bombs came from her rear end while we were working there. Anyways, we are buds even though she kinda nasty. 

Pday today also took us up to durres for a beach party with basically all of Albania. Kinda do miss the smaller get togethers but I will appreciate what we got while we got it. Lushnje is in the perfect place for pday because we can drive just about everywhere with how central it is. Blessings. 

I think we will buy an aloe vera plant. Updates to come on that. Love you guys!!! Send me email updates on your lives because I feel out of the loop because in reality I totally am. 

Me dashuri, Elder Jakob Milli

Lushnje Week 6

Lushnje Week 7