Dear Family,

We got 6 new investigators this week.  That is cool.  It's been progressively increasing each week it seems.  We no longer have any progressing investigators though, so that's a bummer.  I've started carrying around the Family Proclamation things around with me so I can give them to people while I'm street contacting and stuff.  We're starting up FHE for the branch here in Shkoder, so that should be fun.  We had quite a few people in church yesterday, but everyone seemed to be talking like the whole time.  Everybody seemed to be singing different paces during the hymns, and it didn't help that I had never played the third hymn before, and I didn't have time before church to practice it.  So that last hymn wasn't quite as good as it could have been.

Last Thursday we had zone conference, and it was pretty fun.  We learned a lot of cool stuff and I got a little more time to hang out with Elder Castro-Guzman and a couple other people from my MTC group.  I want to be able to meet some of the new missionaries, but I'm not sure I'll get a chance for a while.  I don't know for sure, but I think Elder Fahey and I have a pretty good chance of staying here in Shkoder.  We'll see what happens.  While we were in Tirana, we stopped by this book store before zone conference so Elder Fahey could pick up an Albanian grammar book.  They had all sorts of fun books in Albanian as well such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  That would be fun to come home with.  It would be cool to have books to read after my mission that could help me hold on to Albanian.

We've been trying to send letters to the leaders of other churches here in Shkoder in an attempt to try to build up a good relationship with the other religions here.  The other elders have been able to attend a Catholic mass thing, and they told us about it.  It sounded pretty interesting.  We went to drop off a letter at a Mosque, and we saw people praying in there.  It was a fun thing to see.  The inside of the Mosque was pretty cool looking, although I didn't really get to see too much of it.  It is really cool to serve in a place with Muslim being one of the main religions.  Throughout the day we always hear the prayer calls going off.  There are also quite a few big Catholic churches around here, so throughout the day we here the Catholic bells and the Muslim prayers going off a lot.  The Muslim prayers sound like they're singing.  It gives kind of a Middle-East feel to things when they go off.  The Muslims seem to have their own greeting as well.  People say Sallam Aleku and the response is Aleku Sallam.

This morning was pretty cool.  We met with this member called Kristian, and were able to give him a Liahona to read.  We then did some street contacting for an hour before we met this guy who wanted to learn more, so we took him to the church and gave him a zero lesson.  It went pretty well.  He said we could meet him again tomorrow, so that's cool.

It's started getting warm here.  It's similar to the change of weather down in Logan.  In Logan, we'd have a week of warm, then a week with snow, and the weather would just jump back and forth until summer came.  Here, it gets really hot for a couple days, then it rains and is cold again.  It is so much warmer when the sun is out.  It's pretty crazy how much warmer it gets, and yet people are still dressed in coats and everything when it's hot outside.  It reminds me of Italy when everyone seemed to be dressed all warm and were wondering why we were wearing shorts and t-shirts and stuff.

Hey Brandon, Happy birthday tomorrow! Anyways, that's about all I got for this week.  

Love,

Elder Wallentine