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.