Friends and family! I am here once again entering into your pile of unread emails, potentially doomed to never be opened by many of you. I am honored for the privilege.
Things are good here in the mission field though! I mentioned in my last email that I was gonna get transferred and that is true. I am now serving in Gjakova, Kosovo. It's such a beautiful place. Kosovo is northeast of Albania and still full of many albanians. Some of you may be aware of Kosovo's history as a recently formed country, but long story short Kosovo used to be part of Serbia (and still is according to some countries), but in the 90s long built pressure for ethnic albanians to leave the Kosovo area of Serbia erupted into conflict and genocide. It's a very very sad history but eventually the war was won against Serbia and Kosovo claimed their independence and later established themselves as a country in 2008. As you can imagine, just the vibe in Kosovo is very different from Albania with their different histories as well as the fact that they speak a different dialect of albanian here which is way harder to understand. Very fun to learn and practice though I must say. It's like british compared to american english but just way cooler and with different grammar and women that have deeper voices than I ever will. Pretty fun though. I'm coming up on finishing my 3rd week here and it's been a good time for sure vibing with my brotha Elder Hodges.
Pretty strange that I'm so near the end of the mission though! I've got about 3 weeks left. I'm gonna try and email each week to try and make up for my months of silence. We are grinding the work in Gjakova as it is and trying to enjoy ourselves all the same. Gjakova is a small and peaceful city and missionary work hasn't had much going on there for a while, but we do happen to do a lot of member support. My companion is the branch president here and I'm his sidekick/clerk which has been fun! It's the exact opposite of how my time in Lushnje was which is interesting to experience. We eat really good bread and sausage and walk around trying to understand people and their awesome accents. We are also the tech guys for the country of Kosovo so we do a lot of work for the Facebook page in making content and responding to messages that come in from ads and such. We have been doing weekly episodes for a podcast talk show of sorts which is cool and has been good practice for the albanian for real for real which is nice after so much time of not using it that much. We've got some big plans for the rest of this month in just pumping content out on the Kosovo page so it should be pretty good!
Something of note was that I had my last zone conference, which led immediately into this epic 2 day elders conference of sports and beach and hobo dinners. I'm not joking you can fact check with the photos. We literally spent one of the days at the beach the whole time doing service, playing sports, and essentially camping without the overnight stay. Super epic. We also have had stacked pdays in Kosovo because there is some amaaazing shiz up here. It's very mountainous and green and just awesome. I'm just trying to enjoy every moment in these beautiful places before I dip and can't come back for a couple years. I have every pday planned out until the end so hopefully it all goes according to plan because it'll be pretty epic.
Anyways, I won't get all deep and mushy on you guys in this email but it will probably come soon. All I will say is that this mission is amazing. The people I've met and the experiences made will never be forgotten (at least most ahah I can't make promises my old senile self can't keep). Time has flown by and I've learned so much about myself, about the church, and most of all about Jesus Christ. Coming out here is by far the best decision I've ever made and I wish any and all of you could have these same experiences I've been having.
Have an awesome week and tune in next time to see if I get trunky. 😀
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