Hey family,

So I think jet lag is pretty much gone about now.  The weather has been pretty nice here, but this past week has started getting really cold.  We started setting our heater to turn on like an hour before we return home so we always come home to a warm half of a house.  The room we spend most of our time is the bedroom/kitchen since it's the half of the house that is warm.  A couple of these last days the sun has been out, and it is amazing how much warmer it is with the sun.  One day we had no sun like the whole day, and it was freezing.  But we at least have sun until about 5:30, so it's not too bad.

I started reading the New Testament in Personal Study near the beginning of this transfer for the mission progression program thing we have, and I'm almost done.  I'm in the middle of revelations right now.  This will be the first time I've really read the whole New Testament, so that's cool.  I read most of it when I was in seminary, but I only got like halfway through the epistles and stuff.  I have enjoyed reading the New Testament more than I thought I would.  It's pretty good.

We had YM with the 2 young men in our branch last Saturday where we gave a spiritual thought and then played a card game.  That was fun.  It's kinda nice that my companion is the branch president because it gives us some variety to our work.  Missionary work in Lushnje is kinda slow, and we spend pretty much all day trying to find people to teach.  In the mornings we do some street contacting, and in the afternoons we usually go tracting.  It's kinda nice because we usually get in about once a day when tracting.

We have 1 investigator sort of.  He asked some questions the other day about the church giving money to people, so we're a little worried that he only wants to join the church to get money.  We have also met with this inactive member a couple times that I hope we can get active again.  I guess at some point he was filling out his mission papers, but then he went to Greece or something and I'm not sure what all happened.

I've noticed that I am able to understand more and more of what people say.  It's a pretty slow process, but the things I think I have down now is when people tell me I need to wear a warmer coat, when people are talking to my companion about how I can't understand Albanian, and a couple other topics that come up.  I'm getting down a lot of the excuses of why people don't want to learn more about the church.  We get plenty of practice with those.

So there were a couple things I wanted to write home about. The first thing is where does the last name Wallentine come from?  Like where are my ancestors and stuff from?  That's a really common question.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this in a previous letter yet, but our shower is pretty much just our bathroom.  The shower head is just on the wall and the drain on the floor.  It's pretty funny.  The other day we discovered that every time we flush the toilet, if you look out the window, you can see everything that got flushed go shooting out into the stream thing.  I could picture Caleb sitting in the bathroom all day flushing things down the toilet and watching them come out on the ground.

The other day, our water heater pretty much exploded.  Elder Flack woke up in the middle of the night and went into the bathroom, and the heater was spraying water everywhere.  Then the power went out shortly after.  He was able to turn off the water for the house, so for the beginning of that day, we had no power or water.  That was interesting.  The power came back on pretty soon after we woke up, and the water heater was fixed around 2 when the plumber came.  So now everything is better.

I can't really think of much else that has happened this week.  Basically tracting and doing whatever we can to find people is our life right now.  We meet with a couple members every week since Elder Flack is the Branch President, so that's a nice way to break up our day a little.  I had another kind of soup recently.  I can't remember what it was called, but it looked just like this bean soup I had called Flasule I think, except it had some kind of meat in place of the beans.  I thought it was delicious.  The other day we had some crepes that were really good too.  We've also had some really good Byrek lately, and Suflaqes just seem to get better each time I eat them.  They are hard to eat though.

The other day I was reading through my journal, and I was a little bummed when I got to the part where my time at college would have been if I had written anything from college.  I wrote in my journal a couple times at college, but most of the time I was just trying to catch up with everything from the past that I had forgotten to write.  I think it was Saturday night when I started writing everything I remembered from college.  I was surprised at how much I remembered.  I think I have like 3 or 4 pages from first semester, and I'm still not quite done.  It'll be nice to have it all updated and stuff.  I've done pretty good at writing in my journal every night on my mission, and I have more than doubled what I had written before my mission.

Hey Brandon, the first week in Albania was pretty tough, but once I got past that, it hasn't been too bad.  I'm getting used to basically everything now.  So now everything is pretty much getting better. Caleb, you're good at typing! Albania does have ice cream, but I haven't had any here yet.  I have had lots of yummy food though.  Maybe I can learn how to make some of it so you can have some after my mission. There are buses here, there are also school buses.  The school buses here are really small though.  I don't ride a bicycle, but I have ridden this thing called a furgon that is a van that is just like a bus.  There are lots of things that could probably make a collection, but I haven't collected anything yet.  There are some really funny looking hats here.  Maybe I could get one of those.  I love you and I hope you have a good day! Emily and Tyler, they have a lot of cool foods here most of which I have found really delicious.  I have gone down to this city called Fier south from Lushnje where I am now for a couple district meetings with the missionaries there.  There's this place down there with some delicious pizza.  I think they spell pizza "pice" here, which ends up being pronounced almost the same.  So far I have had Suflaqe, Byrek (a pie looking thing), Qofte (looks like a hot dog almost), Flasule (bean soup), and this rice pudding stuff that tastes really good.

So far, my favorite things I've done have been when we get to teach people lessons because we have spent so much time tracting and talking to people on the road.  Not very many people want to meet with us here, but it's awesome when they do.

Anyways, I love you all and hope everything goes well at home.

Love,
Elder Wallentine

Dear family,

So for the first couple days here in Lushnje, I would wake up and feel pretty horrible and not want to do anything.  It made me realize why some missionaries don't wake up on time, but I still got out of bed and got ready and stuff.  The mornings are getting easier, and I'm able to wake up happier and it doesn't seem as cold in our apartment each morning.  Maybe it was just jet lag or something, but I feel much better now.

I talked to my trainer a little bit, and I found out that a lot of things that had me kind of discouraged are typical for new missionaries, so it was nice to know I wasn't alone.

This last week, I think that a big thing that was bothering me was that I couldn't seem to bring myself to talk to people when I was street contacting, but I think I'm doing better.  I'm making slow progress with being able to stop and talk to people on the road, so my goal is to be able to comfortably do that by the end of this transfer.

Tracting is weird.  I've never liked doing door-to-door stuff, but I've enjoyed tracting at times.  Although, I seem to enjoy it more the times when I'm not looking forward to it.  It's really weird.  We have gotten into like 2 or 3 doors tracting where we taught a short lesson, but it seems like the people who let us in didn't really want to learn from us.  One lady invited us in because we weren't Jehovah's Witnesses.  I can hardly understand most of what people say, but I guess that is to be expected in the first couple weeks.

My trainer told me the other day that during the summer that some cities in Tirana completely shut down for like 3-4 hours in the middle of the day because everybody takes a nap.  So we won't really be able to do any tracting, and not many people will be outside.  I think the schedule then gives us a 3 hour lunch, but we stay out later and head out earlier.

We ran into this one guy on the road while we had a table set up with fliers that came up and said he'd meet us at the church at 6pm that day.  Turns out he's an inactive member.  We taught him a lesson, and then we all left.  I got pretty excited, but I guess the guy did that like a year ago just to check up on the branch.  We invited him to church and we're planning on calling him later this week to try to meet with him again.

So when we head inside at 7, that's when we do our daily planning and language study which usually takes until around 8:30ish.  Then after that, I've usually just been studying.  It seems a lot harder to study the language.  I know there's something I need to study, but I never know exactly what to study and how to study it.  I figured it was because I didn't really have any good goals for it.  So the other day I built a language study plan that will hopefully help me there.  It's just hard to study the language after coming home from working so long.  I'm going to try to be able to teach the first lesson in Albanian well by the end of January, then I'll work on the 2nd and 3rd lessons in February.  It would be nice to be able to get the first three down before the end of my first transfer.

I think I'm able to understand more and more of what people say each day.  It's coming slowly.  Some people seem impossible to understand, and others I can understand rather well.  I'm hoping to be able to understand stuff by the end of 3 months in Albania.

Anyways, that's about all that's happened this past week.  Tell everyone hi!

Love,
Elder Wallentine

PS The food here that I've had so far has been delicious.

Dear Family,

So far, the mission has been completely different than I expected which was a little unsettling at first.  One thing that I just noticed that caught me off guard was that this keyboard in this internet cafe is exactly the same as the ones we have in America.  I figured they'd be different.

Anyways, my first companion is Elder Flack, and we are in Lushnje for now.  I still haven't had a normal day of mission life here.  The first day here, I didn't really go street contacting, but I went with an AP and other missionaries from my district to go visit a newly baptized family.  That went well.

The first two days can't really be considered normal days, then the first day that would have been normal, Elder Flack had a Branch President meeting in Tirana, so I spent most of the day in Fier with Elder Fredrickson because both our companions are branch presidents.  I had my first Suflaqe (Sue-flach-ay) in Fier, and they are delicious.  I've heard some of them aren't quite as good, but I'll find that out.  Yesterday, our landlords also brought us some traditional Albanian bean soup, which I forgot what it was called.  They also gave us this rice pudding stuff that was also way good.  Elder Flack wasn't a fan, but I found it delicious.

The daily schedule here in Lushnje is also different.  We wake up at 6 am, have our studies and leave at 9:30 am.  We then have an hour for lunch at 2pm, and we head back home at 7 pm.  It seemed like the schedule made it so we were unproductive, and it just seemed like we didn't have as much time as anybody else to proselyte.  I looked at the "normal" missionary schedule in PMG, and it turns out we have the same amount of time.  Lushnje shuts down around 7pm, so that is why we have to leave early and come in early.  I think most of Albania areas have a 2 hour lunch and no dinner, but since we go in so early, we only have a 1 hour lunch and no dinner.  I think I'll get used to things once everything starts feeling normal.

So my main adjustment hasn't really been to a different culture really, just adjusting a couple views I had about missionary work with what they really are.  Today is P-day, so it isn't exactly normal still, but tomorrow will be my first real normal day in Lushnje.

Both me and Elder Flack are new here in Lushnje, so we're figuring out where things are and trying to figure out what is most effective.  We checked out the area book yesterday, and there were no pages for investigators, but there are plenty of inactive members and former investigators I think.  From the sounds of things, a lot of people get baptized and end up not wanting anything to do with the church afterwards.  I would like to see if we can reactivate at least one member this transfer, so hopefully we can do that.  I would also like a baptism or something.  Mostly, it sounds like we'll just have to get things restarted again.  As in filling our pool of investigators so we can have progressing investigators and all those other good things.

My first thoughts of Albania was that it looked just like Belgium, but with sun, mountains, and palm trees.  The palm trees really surprised me.  I was also surprised to see a couple cacti here in Albania.

So we have no dryer, so we just hang our clothes to dry.  That's going to take some getting used to, but shouldn't be too bad.  I can't understand too much of what people say, but hopefully that will change rather quickly.  I found out one thing I should have worked on in the MTC was learning phrases that were spoken by people in Albania.  I didn't really do that, and I realized yesterday that it probably hurt me.  I'm starting to keep track of some useful phrases and stuff.

The other day in Fier, I talked to this guy named Ylli, which means star in Albanian.  It was really helpful to talk to him.  It was a little strange though.  It wasn't really a normal conversation.  One thing I need to work on is talking to people without worrying about not being able to understand what they say.  The volume here in the cafe got really loud all of a sudden.  Anyways, I guess I'll wrap things up now.

Love,
Elder Wallentine