Mountains are still the best

Sorry to disappoint ladies and gentlemen, but this weeks email will be short and sweet.

Work continues! Not a whole lot changing but we are still heavily working with the branch presidency and getting our active members a little more solid. We actually started doing a family home evening out in the town with all our members there which went really well. Excited to do it again. We are also continuing to meet with Besnik and his wife and all goes well there. 

This weeks pday was the best. We climbed a mountain. There is a very tall and well known mountain here called mount tomorri. Well, legend has it no missionary has ever been able to climb it since it is such a beast. While I didn't get to the high point of the mountain range, we did conquer one of the peaks and wow was it amazing. Had to drive up a terrible dirt road to get to a good starting point, and we kept losing the trail while trying to follow a crappy map I took a screenshot of since maas won't let us have a good GPS map, but it was still amazing. Included are a great number of pictures and videos. It was incredible and gave me high uintah vibes combined with the wellsvilles in how steep they were. My calves are killing me but it was so worth it. We may have been able to peak the high point, but I took us the wrong way and instead we bushwhacked up to a false peak. Still dope. Mountains are always going to be the most beautiful place in the world. The beach is cool, but it gets old. Those mountain sights continue to blow my mind every time. You cannot beat the mountain. 

Have a good week everyone! Hopefully my calves recover soon. 

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Elder Perrine Used Explosion - Bye Bye Shower :((

Well, another week has gone by. Can't say I'm all that surprised at this point. Maybe if I had amnesia it would. Come to think of it life would probably be super exciting and fresh all the time with amnesia. Maybe not though I don't know a whole lot about amnesia gotta be honest. Maybe split personality disorder could be cool.

Yeah clearly I may be losing a little sanity but I'm still here enough to work so I call that a win. Speaking of work thats going decent. We finished our temple class which is dope. Now I can start doing some interviews which is one step further in getting these guys to the greatest place on the planet. When it comes to other work, we have been trying to work with and find new less actives because our old less actives are pretty active now hahaha. Guess we did a good job. We are also still working with Besnik and his family. I am getting excited for them because I think at the very least Besnik and his wife will get baptized together here in a few months. Pray that they will have the opportunity to come to church! As soon as they can consistently and do, they are ready for baptism. 

We had another exchange this week. The zone leaders decided to do a cool mega exchange thing where they split up going to Berat and also here, and then they split up our companionships too so Elder Gallagher went to Berat while we got Elder Perrine and Allred here with my good ol buddy and now ZL Elder Starr! Good exchange. Very good productive stuff went on. We even got to dump wheat grain off of a truck down into these big grates. Wild.

Flash forward to the next morning. Poor Elder Perrine wasn't feeling too good so he was up most of the night. As soon as 6:30 came he jumped right into the shower. About 30 minutes later I'm still kinda out of it (hard morning haha) and I just hear this massive crash and the sound of shattering glass. Going to investigate, I head over to the direction of the noise. Elder Allred had the same idea and checked to see if the mirror in the room I was in fell off or not. Background info about our bathroom: It is very small and the mirror in there is tiny. It is definitely the worst mirror in the house and it would be hard to even get that thing off the wall because its like bolted. My next guess was maybe he had somehow knocked the sink over because that was porcelain, but same problem there. There was no shot. Anyways, my tired brain decided he must have dropped the towel rack or something and instead of knocking to see if my boy Elder Perrine was okay I just shrugged it off. 2 minutes later the door opens and I just hear "you might want to see this". Well, I was wrong about the towel rack. The floor was completely covered in glass shards of all shapes and sizes. Our shower is one of those small ones that has the round glass wall around it. It has two sliding glass doors that meet and seal together in the middle. Apparently, when Elder Perrine went to open the doors after finishing his shower, one of them fell off its hinges and released a portion of its harnessed nuclear energy. The result was more shattered glass I've seen in one room maybe ever except for in movies haha. Anyways, thankfully I came to my senses and I very quickly asked him if he was okay and found that his feet were pretty wrecked from the glass. Not only did a lot probably fall on him, but he had to sweep the glass away with his feet to move across the room to the door and put his clothes on. I spent the next hour or so keeping the mood light and patching my boy up using our really sub par first aid kit. Elders Starr and Allred came in clutch and cleaned up a good amount of the mess in the meantime, but not before getting a good picture of the carnage. The picture really doesn't do it justice, but it's still pretty dope. Morale of the story: I need to get the missionary apartments some better first aid stuff. Also I need to work on my first responder skills. Probably should've gave a knock to check in. In my paranoid mind it could have been a lot worse and hit an artery or something and he could've been mostly unresponsive from shock. The locked door would've caused a problem too, so we are grateful God is looking out for us too. Since it all turned out well though, it makes a great story and something to laugh about with the guy. We are still trying to find a new shower door. 

Anyways thats about it. Went to a cool little waterfall today and did a barefoot hike. Felt nice until I made the wrong trail choice and walked into a bunch of goathead seeds. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Yall are dope. Jave te mbare merre lehte paqe jashte

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Spies for Jesus

If you're still reading my emails at this point, you're either one of my parents or have fallen deeply in love with me or something. Hey, I love you guys too, thanks.

Lessons from the week:

- its really hot

- night time field work is the best

- night time runs are the best

- Vladamir/Lenin Putin lives in Lushnje

- Old men are hilarious

Speaking of the Putin guy, we've been spending a few minutes sitting down with the giant congregation of old men playing dominoes the last few days to build our old people connections. This last time we did it though, I sat next to someone who immediately accused us of being spies and then wouldn't tell me his name. Even though we had an old man friend from last time we sat down backing up or validity as normal people, our new friend wasn't convinced. He then pulled out his ID and covered up half of his signature on it so that all that was visible was the name "Vladamir". He then went on to tell us he was Putin and when we didn't believe him he told us he was Vladamir Lenin. That was convincing enough for us. The funniest part about the ID thing though was that he only covered up his signature and not his name where it was actually printed out on the card, so I totally saw his name from the beginning... hahaha.

We had the Berat elders come up to Lushnje for a super exchange because we did some epic service. Wednesday night after family home evening, our good friend Besnik urgently asks us if he can have our help with some fshat work at his place, so we hesitantly agreed though we didn't have much time left in the day. Boy, am I glad we did, because that was the best service I've ever done. We arrive, and turns out he needs us to haul hay, but it's not actually hay it's straw thats been cut from wheat stalks so it's super light and makes us feel super buff and cool. The coolest part though was definitely the tactic of stacking like 8 layers of straw on top of this small trailer behind his tractor. It was nuts and he just tied it all so it wouldn't fall off. The pictures don't even do it justice it was epic. Anyways, with all that explained, of course we called up Berat to come up the next day because we wanted them to take part in the epicness. Not only did we get more epic straw hauling experience, he fed us amazing fshat beef and salad and stuff. He's such a baller.

SIDE NOTE OF IMPORTANCE: Albania doesn't have any dish that is remotely spicy, but apparently they do have some mega hot peppers. Besnik gave us some peppers and so of course I got all excited (because I miss spicy food) and shoved the entire pencil length thing in my mouth and start chewing. The result was that I was crying and almost regretting my very existence for the next 15 minutes. Maybe I'm just not used to spicy food anymore, but that thing was at least a habanero level hot and 3 times the size. The pain just kept getting worse and worse and I had no milk. Besnik was like "bro you're supposed to eat little pieces not all of it at once"

Cool update on the branch: We split into priesthood and relief society for the first time since I got here and it went quite well. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and it seemed to get people more involved. Progress! We also should be sustaining and setting apart a new relief society presidency next week which is dope.

Our teaching pool is still very small. It's basically just Besnik and his family. Other than that we are still trying to work a lot with less actives. Most of the less actives we have been working with have actually become pretty active so thats a win but now we need more less actives to work with hahaha. It's a process.

Yup. Thats all. Catch yall again next week.

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GEZUUUAAARRRR AMERICAAAAA WOOOOO

I need to go to bed so I hope bullet points are good enough this week

• Albanian frogs sounds weird

• Scooped more poop but this time we spread it over an entire field with pitchforks

• zone conference again

• lots of planning and a little stress because

• we had a dope beach activity on Saturday combined with the Fier branch and Vlorë ward and u kenaqem shume. 

• Lushnjë now has a full branch presidency YUS 

• America is the best so we made no bake cookies for everyone in our apartment building so they could celebrate independence day with us

• Beach party grill 4th of July is dank 

• lots of pictures and more to be added once I get them because typically I'm not the one to take them

• love you guys

• have a good week

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