Dear family,

We got transfer calls last Saturday, and I am being transferred to Shkodёr.  That is about as far from where I am now as I can get.  I've heard good things about Shkodёr and I'm pretty excited.  Today I need to pack my bags and get ready to head out.  Tomorrow, I will have a 2 hour furgon ride to Tirana where I will then get another 2 hour furgon ride to Shkodёr.  So I think I will end up getting there around 3 pm or so.  Shkodёr is where they have a really different dialect than here in the south, so that will be interesting.  My new companion will be Elder Fahey (pronounced Fay).  He's been here for about 4 1/2 months, so it'll be fun to see how different it is being with a rather new missionary compared to an older missionary that is going home after this next transfer.  I may end up speaking shkodranc or something after these next couple transfers.  We just barely closed the house in Lushnje, and we have just started settling here in Fier, so that's kind of funny.  Although, even if I would have stayed here in Fier, we would have had to move somehow because we have been looking for a new house so there aren't 4 elders crammed into the one apartment.

It may rain a little more often in Belgium than here.  I hear it rains a ton here in Albania during the winter, but not as much during the summer.  It hasn't really rained too much while I've been here, but when it does rain, it comes down consistently for several days.  It's pretty nuts.  When I first got here in the country, apparently the missionaries in Shkodёr were cut off because of flooding.  Yesterday was pretty cool.  We had 6 other people at church putting us at like 8 including me and Elder Flack.  I played the piano again and gave a talk which I think I did much better this time than last time.  I heard that the papers to close Lushnje have been filled out, but I have also heard that it could take like 3 months for the branch there to close.  Elder Flack says that he has talked to the members there and that they all seem to want the branch to close.  Although, some of them seem to have a bit of a problem with traveling to Fier for church.  It would take 45 minutes to get there, 45 minutes to get back, and 1/2 hours of church.  That would be like 3-4 hours!  Oh wait, that's how long regular church is.  It's kind of funny to listen to Elder Flack talk to them.  They make it sound horrible that they'd be spending 3 hours in order to go to church, and he says how church is typically 3 hours long anyways.

I think if the branch does end up closing, there might be a furgon organized to take them to Fier, and if that's the case, I think at least 3-4 people will come.  I think the main reason Lushnje is closing is just because the situation there has been the same for like 2-3 years.  Not much has changed in that time I guess.  I think I would like some of those McCormmick packets.  They're good for lunch on Sundays I've found since we can't really go to any restaurants or anything on Sunday.

I have found how hard weekly planning is before the week of transfers especially when we've just barely been thrown into a new area.  Anyways, Elder Fredrickson, one of the Elders in our district, was jealous to hear where I was being transfered.  I guess he really wanted to go up to Shkodёr.  He had told me how he didn't really want to go back to Tirana, but that's exactly where he ended up going.  It's kinda funny.  Elder Flack has told me that often when missionaries get what they want at transfers, they typically don't end up liking it.  I guess the president has granted some missionaries' requests to be with certain companions, and sometimes it just makes them miserable.

So I finished the Book of Mormon last week.  That was way cool.  I also decided I don't really like 4 Nephi very much.  It's not a very good part of the scriptures to read if you want to get motivated for anything.  It basically goes from everyone being all righteous and happy to everyone getting plunged into wickedness and becoming savage people.  I also found that the last 2 chapters of Moroni are kind of interesting.  Chapter 9 seemed to me to say a lot of the bad things that were happening with the Nephites and stuff, and then chapter 10 just seems to turn everything around and Moroni talks about like all the spiritual gifts and whatnot.  It's kind of cool.

I have started reading the Doctrine and Covenants, and I am now at section 34 I think.  Last Wednesday the 17 was Kosovo's Independence day.  My companion randomly brought that up when we were planning.  I guess it's been a country for 2 years now.  That's kind of cool.  I guess people there are basically Albanian by blood or something, so that's cool.

Yesterday for lunch, Elder Fredrickson made these Fahitas or something which was cool to have some kind of Mexican food.  They don't really have that here.  Oh yeah, just today, we went to this mall-type thing, and compared with the stores I've been to up to now, it seemed huge.  It is tiny compared to like the mall in Boise, but it looked pretty big to me.

The transfer calls were probably the highlight of the week.  It's kind of funny; it seemed almost like Christmas.  It's good to know that there is stuff like that that can bring excitement to us missionaries.  Although, this last transfer, I guess not many people got moved around.  Most places just stayed the same.  I just swapped areas with one missionary, then 3 elders rotated around and the 3 sisters from my MTC group rotated around as well.  Elder Flack was an assistant pretty recently, so it was kind of interesting to hear how transfers work out and everything.  Last night, we talked to a couple Muslims about religion, and although I was able to somewhat follow the conversation, it was hard to understand a lot of it.  Although like 70% of the people in Albania are Muslim, most of them don't really practice the religion.  These two guys were pretty strong Muslims though.  It's kind of fun here in Albania.  We get to hear the prayer calls 5 times each days from the Mosques.  The Mosque here in Fier is pretty huge.

A fun Albanian word I learned was qullac (choo-lah-ch).  When you say this to someone, it basically is like calling them a softy or a mama's boy, but it means vegetable pie.  That was pretty funny.  There are also shirts here that have English words on them, but they make no sense at all.  I can't think of any examples at the moment, but it's pretty funny.

Well, I think that's all that has been going on this past week.  Next week you'll probably hear about how Shkodёr is.

Love,

Elder Wallentine