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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Short again

Yes, sadly it's true. My likely one and only companion shorter than me has left. He is now bravely traveling the land of Durrës 40 minutes away. It is just so sad and I'm still getting over it. I'm just here with Elder Gallagher now, a piece of our trio brutally and violently taken from us. 

Other than that, honestly nothing super noteworthy has happened, hence why I didn't write an email last week. I hoped this week would be more eventful, but it kinda wasn't hahaha sooooo rip. Can't leave you guys hanging though so this is the show of my love for you. Anyways, it's been good. We've had some service, lots of little branch work tasks, temple prep lessons, and melting because it is quite hot here this time of year. I actually ended up buying some plane tickets for some people going to the temple so that was kinda cool.

The hope is to have more to report on in the near future. I'm wanting to find more time for finding new people to teach because sometimes in Lushnjë and specifically in this calling it's hard to feel like a missionary. It'd be nice to teach some regular missionary lessons to new friends again. Things are progressing well though. I've said it before, but it's very cool to be able to teach temple prep and get our members ready to go to the temple for the first time. I'm excited for the Mati family to get back later this week to see how it was for them. People making it to the temple to be sealed together forever is definitely the one of the end goals of missionary work like this!

On a side note, the girls who work at the grocery store across the street like me a little too much. We buy a lot of stuff from them and we're definitely their #1 customers. Anyways, I definitely made the mistake of telling one of them my first name and now every time I walk in I hear "Heeeej Jacoooob" in a uncomfortable Albanian flirty way. Oh well it was kinda worth it because I actually got them to give me one of their employee shirts so now I can walk around with this Iper Market polo and flex on all the other missionaries. It's kinda the ultimate Lushnjë trophy. 

OOOH I almost forgot but something noteworthy DID happen. Jehovahs Witnesses used to have a big proselyting presence here in Albania until about two years ago when there were some suicides tied to some people they were teaching in regards to trying to get resurrected... People hate them a lot now and they kinda stopped proselyting. It stinks though because everyone thinks they we are them so sometimes it's hard to get good first interactions with people. Anyways, THEYRE BACK IN LUSHNJE. We've seen them 3 or 4 times now with their stands on street corners handing out pamphlets. Based on some stories I've heard from returned missionaries, they may cause problems for us. Not to mention even more people will probably think we're them now that they're back out. Oh well. I said hi to one of them and he was cool. We'll just have to make sure everyone is getting the full restored truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and teach people how to receive answers to their prayers through the spirit and we shouldn't have any problem because God is clutch. 

We went to some dope ruins I haven't been to since last year today and then after went to the beach and made this really dope arch out of sand that I could crawl through. Good stuff.

That's all for these past two weeks. Hopefully there are some entertaining pictures/videos for you below :))

Lushnjë Week 17 photos

Lushnjë Week 18 photos 

Return to the Fatherland

This week was madness. As it should be. 

One thing that was pretty awesome was that we had the unique opportunity to clean the home of our relief society president. For the last few months she has not been very active in church and started working 24/7 as a nanny. Because of that she hasn't had the opportunity to clean her own house, so in spite of her turning down the offer over and over again, our district met up Wednesday morning and cleaned it all up. It was awesome and it really touched her. :))

I also, as mentioned in the subject, returned to the holy land of my fathers. Gjirokastër is probably my favorite place in the world. Starting my mission there, as well as the fact that it is incredibly beautiful and awesome, makes it have significant meaning for me. We were invited to go down for a large service project at a school near Gjirokastër. We stayed an entire day and then some down there before returning which was so so so awesome! I love that place. We painted this school and throughout the next couple weeks we will be returning and putting in some playground equipment which is dank. It's been a neat experience especially when the school kids have helped out. We will be returning on Wednesday.

Gjithashtu we had some RM's visit lushnje this weekend. One of which actually served here an entire year and was also branch president. We got to spend some time with them and learned a ton about the area and about the members. They also came to church the next day and brought a bunch of less active members with them! It was such a great Sunday. We had the whopping attendance of 23 which destroyed the previous record. We usually have about 10 less people hahaha. Very neat to learn from the legends themselves. I've got a lot to live up to but they for sure have given me a lot of inspiration!!!

Beach pday again. What can I say it's just the best. 

Cau cau pafshim 

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Did you know you can get sunburned through a shirt?

Yes that is true. I learned it today. Once again, we had an incredible beach pday playing volleyball. I chose to not wear sunscreen thinking that my tan had me well protected already, and I was very wrong. Everything hurts hahaha. I may never be the same man again. My shirt was on the whole time without rolled up sleeves or anything (like a good missionary because there were sisters there) and somehow my shoulders and back are burned to crap. The sun was incredibly powerful we can just say. I don't really know how the UV spectrum works when it tells you that number on the weather app, but I'm pretty sure today must have been like UV 1000 because I am so defeated right now. I will be recovering for at least the entire week I think.

This was a good week indeed. We had zone conference to start things off with the 3 countries here in the north which is always epic. Love seeing all my buddies. I also got root beer which was sick. I miss that stuff so much. The root beer flavor packets just don't do it justice. Also at zone conference we received our new shoku elder Gallagher. We are now happily living the trio life making fun of each other and stuff. 

ACCOMPLISHMENT: we finished constructing our bean bag this week after an entire transfer of trying to gather materials and put it together and not waste work hours. It is incredible. We need some more stuffing actually but we will hold out on that for a little while. I've spent a little longer than I probably should've on that bean bag these last few days since we finished it. Pictures included of course.

We also spent a grand total of 12 hours or so working inside the completed product of our previous greenhouse service projects. It is fully operational and we did 12 hours of weeding. I thought our garden was big growing up but man I miss our garden right now. There is no end in sight. 12 of us going at it for 4 hours completes only 6 rows and I'm pretty sure there's like 45. Pray for us and also my sunburns while you're at it. 

We started our temple prep class this week too and it was awesome! It is so cool to be teaching that class. I'm very excited for these guys to be able to go to Rome. More of them showed up than I expected to be honest which is great! We get to do this for the next 6 weeks or so and it'll be an awesome journey. 

Now it is time for the deep thought of the week. Elder Skene and I had a really good conversation about what friendship really is on the way to zone conference. It was prompted by some talk we had to listen to that only briefly talked about it, but it stemmed a thought provoking powwow session. Anyways, the talk said that true friendship is based off of compassion and respect. That is such an awesome concept. There is nothing in that description that has anything remotely to do with getting gain or profiting from the relationship. It is solely a relationship built on showing these two things to someone. We then went on to discuss how these two things are what really determines if a friendship or relationship is genuine or not as well. When you can just continue to give real compassion and respect in every interaction with this person, that person is going to feel incredibly and genuinely loved and appreciated. As a consequence, they will feel inspired by their compassion and respect for you for being such a good friend, and they will do the same back to you, creating this cycle of exponentially growing love. However, we discussed also that for some reason, often times it is hardest to show these simple two things with the people we are already closest with. There are quite a few possible reasons for this, but one that we discussed was the fact that there is a difference between natural behavior and genuine behavior. Being genuine takes some sacrifice and a great deal of effort some times, which is far from our natural fallen preference. It takes consistent effort and adjustment to continue showing this genuine compassion and respect to the people we care about which can sometimes lead us to fizzle out in our genuinity after a while with those people we are around often. We fall into our natural habits and stop being completely genuine in that sense. So, the obvious solution is that we must change our human nature. We must force ourselves to put in that extra genuine effort so often, that our natural habit becomes that genuinity. It's a lofty goal, but certainly changing our nature is a big reason we came here to Earth in the first place. 

Anyways, those of you who were able to follow that likely scattered thought process get Jacob points. Remind me to give you an extra hug when I get home. That is your reward.

Have a great week everyone! I love you all!

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