Hello family,

I got the letters you sent through the mail, so I guess whatever address you guys have works.  Last week seemed really hard, and all of the sudden, it seems like everything is getting much, much easier.  I don't think I had too much trouble adjusting to MTC life, so it didn't really matter that I was just tossed into the daily schedule of MTC life.  The biggest issue I had last week was that I had a ton of stuff I had coming up that I was unsure how to do.  After Saturday, when I taught my five minute lesson in Albanian, I felt much better about the progress I have been making in the language.  It didn't seem like I was making any progress until I actually started to use it.

The other day, we learned how to bear our testimonies in Albanian.  I'm continuing to try to improve my Albanian prayer and testimony so I'm not just saying the same things over and over.  I think I'm starting to see patterns with conjugating verbs, nouns, and nounitizing verbs, and verbitizing nouns.  I'm picking up quite a bit of grammar as well.  I've been reading the Book of Mormon in Albanian alongside the English one, and I've noticed that I am able to understand more and more of the Albanian verses.  I think there have been a couple verses that I have understood almost all of it without checking the English.

So far, the biggest problem I've had is probably with other people.  In high school, the most annoying people to me were know-it-all type people who pretty much had to be right.  Turns out there are 2 of them in my district.  I'd say something, and most of the time I could tell they didn't listen to a thing I said because they responded in a way completely irrelevant or just didn't respond at all.  I'm trying to not let it annoy me, and I think I'm doing better at dealing with it.

I started running at gym time, and ever since I started doing that, I've been sleeping really well.  It still seems impossible to sleep in past 6:20 am though. I sent letters to a bunch of my friends recently, and 3 of them were returned because I needed international stamps.  Now ever since I've gotten those stamps, I haven't been able to make it to the drop box with them.  Hopefully I can drop them off today.

I met these guys from another district that are on the same floor as my room, and when I told them I was here for 12 weeks they were pretty surprised.  It was pretty funny.  I think they are only here for 3 weeks.

On Sunday, we went to see the Joseph Smith movie, and I told my companion Elder Smith, "Ky karrige eshte rehatshem." (almost all those e's are supposed to have dots over them)  He then told me that he was not interested in learning dutch.  Now, I'm sure that all of you can agree with me that that sentence is not dutch.  It was indeed Albanian for "This chair is comfortable."

Make sure everybody knows that I read their letters and messages and everything and that I appreciated them.

So I always heard that when on a mission, the days seem like years and the years seem like days or something like that.  So far, the days have been going by rather quickly.  The only part that hasn't gone fast every now and then is the portion of time right before dinner where we don't have a teacher or hardly anything going on.  By that time, I've usually studied so much that I can't focus, and everybody else is falling asleep.  I'm trying to work on that so that the whole day can go by quickly.

 

I pretty much only have 10 weeks left here in the MTC, and then I get to go to Albania.  Our teachers have told us that apparently people in Albania are quite nosy, like Americans, don't like missionaries, and have almost no personal boundaries.  The dislike of missionaries was due to some event with Jehovah's Witnesses' faith or something.  One of our teachers had kids throwing bricks and floor tiles at them.  He caught a brick with one hand, and one of the kids got scared and ran off.

Love,
Elder Wallentine  or Elder Uallentain if you want Albanians to pronounce it correctly.