Dear Family,

So, as we left our apartment this morning to do internet, we passed by this kid who just yelled "Banjo!" when the j is pronounced like a y.  Basically it's pronounced like the Spanish word for bathroom, and it also means bathroom.  It was pretty funny.  Anyways, we just finished a game of Settlers of Catan with the other elders, so that was fun.

This week was probably one of the best weeks we've had in Vlore for a while.  The amount of lessons we've had was high, and then about my third week here, they plummeted quite a bit.  Now, they have been steadily working back up.  Our worst here is still better than the average back in Shkodër.  We are also finding lots of new investigators and getting lots of referrals.  We are teaching 3 deacon-aged kids and one 14 year old.  We will probably be getting a good sized deacons quorum going here soon.  These twins we're teaching keep bringing friends to their lessons and to church and everything.  That's way cool.  Yesterday, one of the twins' friends brought their sister to church as well.  They all have Book of Mormons as well.  It's cool.

We also got a referral for a family of 10 yesterday, but when we called them, they said they didn't want to meet with us.  So we're going to have the members who referred them talk to them.  Still, work is pretty awesome here.  I guess in branch council yesterday, members brought up that they wanted to start up a visiting teaching program here, so for a while, it will be people going out with missionaries to visit other members.  That will be way cool.  I guess here in Albania, there are 2000 members, but only 500 active.  So less-active work is pretty important.  I think the activity rate is better here in Vlore than the rest of Albania, so that's good.

Last Tuesday, I found out that language study is indeed important.  I had been slacking with it for a while, but I started up again, and all the sudden, I felt like I could understand a lot better.  I still need to pay a lot of attention to when people are talking though.  I have found it is so much easier to talk to little kids because most of the time they don't really care if you understand them.  This Daniel kid and I started telling each other, "Jam shumë i ofenduar!" which means "I'm very offended."  It's pretty funny.  He has also taught me a couple nursery rhymes.  That's fun.

There's a sister in our district now, and apparentally her family now lives in Brussels over in Belgium.  I found that out today at district lunch.  That's interesting.  I've also heard Belgium mentioned here a lot of times.  That's got to mean Belgium is a pretty big deal.

I think this next week should be at least as effective as the last week.  We're going to be restarting our English course because the numbers have seriously been dwindling.  Hopefully we don't have members coming and disrupting lessons anymore.  In Shkodër we had a problem with young boys disrupting English course.  Here it's just a bunch of members that come and goof off.  It is not really that big of a help.  Hopefully we can remedy this situation.

Our teaching pool seems to really be filling itself which is really nice.  Sometimes it seems like there are more people stopping us than us stopping people.  Missionary work is so much easier when we have members helping us out.  That is the big problem we had in Lushnjë and Shkodër.  Anyways, we should be having 2 baptisms in a week or 2, and then I wouldn't be surprised if we have a couple more later on here in Vlore.  I think the other elders also have a lady that will be interviewed for baptism this weekend so that is also cool.  Well, that's about all for the week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine