Dear family,

I just got the package with all those Valentines last Saturday.  That was cool. Thanks a lot!  I don't really know how long it takes mail to get here because when mail gets here, it goes to the mission office in Tirana so we can't get our mail until someone in our district goes to Tirana or when someone from Tirana comes here. 

Last week I went on exchanges with another elder in my district named Elder Thorpe.  It was pretty crazy; he is almost exactly like my former roommate John Burt.  I think we got along rather well.  He didn't understand too much more of what people were saying than I did, so that was interesting.  I enjoyed the method of street contacting we did.  We stood there and when people were passing, we'd try talking to them, but when there was nobody coming, we'd be able to talk a bit.  When Elder Fahey and I street contact, we typically spread out and try talking to people on our own, which has its perks, but in the down time, we can't really talk to each other.

The other day while we were tracting, we got in and taught this family that had 2 little kids.  We got their phone number and they said we could come back.  We'll see how that goes.  We also taught English for the first time this week.  This lady and her 10 year old son were the only ones there.  It went pretty good, and we showed them the Restoration video.  They seemed pretty interested.  She has another little kid as well that I think is 6.  That would be cool if both these families ended up being investigators.  The first family asked about church, so that would be cool.  We told them that they could bring their whole family to church and that it was meant to be like that, so hopefully they come.  We met them yesterday, on Sunday, after church, so hopefully they can remember for next Sunday, or even better, hopefully we can have a return appointment.

Church yesterday was pretty awesome.  We had 6 people come that weren't missionaries.  2 were really strong members, 1 was slightly inactive, and 3 were a nonmember family.  Apparently, the teenage girl, who came as part of that family, was a girl that Sister Shupe had contacted and talked to last week at the castle.  She brought her parents with her.  Elder Fahey talked to them after sacrament meeting and I think he set up a meeting with them.  That would be cool.  The dad even got up during testimony, and one of the more experienced missionaries said he didn't say any blasphemy, so that was good.  This missionary is also branch president here.  Elder Fahey is worried that when this elder, Elder Vail, goes home in April that he will become branch president.

There are many times in the morning where we have called people to set up meetings and they just never show up.  It isn't too bad though.  As we wait for people to show up, we are basically just doing street contacting, but we have checkpoints.  For example, we wait for like 15 minutes before calling them, and at about 30 minutes, we leave.  It makes gaps of 4 hours of not having lessons more bearable.

Today we decided to spend some time to buy all the food we were going to need for the rest of the week, and it took like 20 minutes.  Usually it would take us like 10 minutes a day to buy stuff for the next day, so this is a little more efficient.  And now we know exactly what we're going to be eating for the next week.  It's a good feeling to know that we have food in the house though.

I've only been here in Shkoder for 2 weeks, and it seems like it's been forever.  It still seems like I just barely got out of college though.  It's weird.  I can see these 2 years going by extremely fast.  I found out that in like 3 days or so, I will be exactly 20% done with my mission.  I was curious, so I figured out how much was 1% of my mission, and it turns out that every 1 week 3 hours and 36 minutes, I complete another 1% of my mission.  So it goes about just as fast as our computer at home would take to scan for viruses.  I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be counting down my mission by percent unless I really want these 2 years to drag on.  It is crazy to think that after this transfer I will be 1/4 of the way done though.

I just realized something kind of funny.  For the past 4 and a half months or so, my life has been focused mainly on just religion, and it's the only thing we talk to people about here.  It's weird to think that most of the people we talk to each day probably don't even think about religion throughout their day.  It just seems so weird now.  I can hardly remember what life was like before my mission.  That is probably a good thing, because I can't really compare life now to life before.  If you compared standing on the street for 3 hours straight to going to a basketball game or something like that, it would be pretty obvious that the basketball game would be more enjoyable.  I think enjoying missionary work kind of comes as you forget what everything else was like.  Mornings have been difficult occasionally, but lately they haven't been too bad.

I've realized that our heater in our room hasn't been keeping it very warm, so I asked Elder Fahey if he and the last elder here had ever cleaned the filters.  He didn't even know you could do that.  I wouldn't blame him, because I wouldn't have known if Elder Flack hadn't cleaned the filters in the house in Lushnje.  So we cleaned them, and now our room has been much warmer.  It's nice to have a warm room at night when we're trying to do language study and everything.  It's hard for me to stay awake if it's too cold while I'm studying.

I think I'm getting better at street contacting.  Well, I think I may be getting better at being a missionary over all.  Progress and change just seems to go by so slow and the only way you can really tell how much progress you've made is to jump back a month or so and see where you were then.  If I've gotten better at anything, it would probably be talking to complete strangers randomly in the street.  Today I got another person's phone number that we can try to contact this week.

I've started trying to keep track of English words that I don't really understand from the scriptures as well.  For example, the word verily.  The scriptures seem to repeat that word all the time and I never really tried finding out what it meant.  So I finally looked it up the other day, and it basically just means truthfully or something like that.

I've almost finished Doctrine and Covenants.  I think I'm in section 136 or something right now.  After I finish this, I'm going to read the Pearl of Great Price, and then I'll probably start trying to read the Old Testament.  I had tried the Old Testament sometime before my mission, but I stopped paying too much attention to what I read around Deuteronomy and Numbers.  So I figure I'll just start over.  At the pace I'm going, I think I'll be able to finish all the standard works before my half-way mark of my mission.  That would be cool.  I am also reading Libri i Mormonit (The Book of Mormon in Albanian) and I'm almost to Mosiah.  I need to finish reading that before being in the country for a year so I can go on a trip with the rest of my MTC district near the end of our mission.

Last week, we got a total of 11 lessons.  That's the most I've gotten so far.  It was pretty sweet.  It would be even more if all these people ended up wanting to investigate the church and everything.  Right now, I think we have like 3 progressing investigators, and a couple potential investigators.  It's cool to be able to write home about this kind of stuff.  You guys didn't really get to hear much about any investigators I've had before, mostly because, I haven't really had any.  I've found out it is a little difficult to make the change into teaching lots of lessons because it doesn't exactly follow the way I expected it to at first.

Thanks for the weekly emails and the Valentines and the chocolates on the Valentines.  I'll send an email next week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine

Oh yeah, and before I forget.  The "cool kids" here like to walk around the city blaring some kind of rap music on their cell phones.  It is funny.  Anyways, I gotta go.