Dear family,

So this week was pretty great.  We got 6 baptismal dates.  This family we've been teaching has been doing really good and they really try to understand what we teach.  They are all really close, and every lesson we have with them seems to have another random relative walking in or something.  We would really like to start teaching the rest of the family.  Another one is the cousin of a recently baptized member.  His name is Ketjon and he is doing really well.  He has had a little trouble reading every day, but I think that is just because he's a 13 year old boy.  The other day, he told me he was going to read 1 Nephi 4-6 in one day, and he did.  He also told us he wants to meet with us every day this week so he will be ready for baptism.  All these baptismal dates are also set for July 4, so this should be a great 4th of July for me this year.  The week before will also be fun for the zone leaders who are going to be coming down to do the interviews with all of them.  It's really cool.  Ketjon also has 2 older brothers that we'd like to start teaching.  We've at least met them both, so that is cool.

It is starting to get really, really hot now.  It is crazy.  Luckily, we have lots of meetings, so we spend a lot of time either at the church or in people's homes.  Most people's homes do not have air conditioning though, so it is still really hot.  It is also very very humid, so that makes things fun as well.  The fan we have in our house was able to keep us cool for quite some time, but lately it doesn't seem to be doing all that much.  We'll probably have to start using our air conditioning soon.

A problem we've seen recently is that we don't know how we are going to have enough time to do a lot of things.  We have such a packed schedule that it is hard to fit in more lessons.  We have cut down a couple meetings significantly, like this family that missionaries would always go over and spend several hours at their house.  Now we are only going to meet them for an hour every time we meet them.  That will free up a lot of time.  Before, I guess missionaries would go over, play uno, eat dinner, then have a short lesson.  Hopefully now we will only be teaching a lesson and maybe eating dinner.  That should help us.  We also need to do better with finding investigators.  We're not doing too well with talking to people in between appointments, but hopefully we can fix that quickly.  We do have plenty of potential investigators though, so we plan on meeting with all of them.

We had zone conference this week, and even with that putting almost a full day out of commission from normal work, we still were able to get 27 lessons.  Zone conference was pretty great though.  I got to meet all the new missionaries.  I ate lunch with them, and we had a good time.  There is also this old investigator who had to stop meeting with us because she was busy with work and school that can now meet with us again.  She was really interested before, so I think that is going to be another baptismal date.  This is the one of the 2 baptismal dates we had gotten my first day in Vlore that obviously still hasn't gone through.

Another cool thing that happened had to do with the new missionary couple here.  The past couple was here for humanitarian purposes, so being the branch president here was just kind of a side note, and they weren't able to focus too much on it.  President and Sister Smith however, are here to help work on the Young Single Adult program here.  They are pretty much here specifically to be the branch president.  They have only been here 2 weeks, and things are starting to pick up momentum.  They want to have interviews with every member here in Vlorë, and so we've started helping them with that.  On top of that, they have called a new president and vice president of the YSA.  They are pretty raring to get this thing moving.  After meeting with them and the new YSA presidency, I got pretty excited with where everything is going.  On top of that, pretty much all the males in church came in white shirts and ties on Sunday.  The only 2 that didn't were these new baptized kids whose mother didn't let them because it was "too hot".  We may have to talk to her about that.

On top of that, this small service project we are doing cleaning up the path by our house is growing.  Now, we not only have the group of kids helping us out, but the local store knew what we were doing, so when we went to buy more trash bags and water, they donated the water to us.  Also, some random people dropped off some drinks for us saying that they weren't able to help us due to work, but that was the way they could help.  This project is turning into a great success.  We are planning on keeping this going after we finish this path and cleaning other places in Vlorë as well.  I think both my companion and President Smith had mentioned something about it being cool if we could somehow get this on TV or something to kind of help people here open up more to us.  That would be way cool.

Our new English course is starting this week as well.  The other one now has almost nobody coming, and the members that come just make noise.  So this time, we have told the members that they either come to help or they don't come at all.  I had ended up resorting to taking a lot of the noisy 12ish year old kids outside of the room we were teaching in so the lesson would be less noisy.  Last Saturday however, I was not able to do this because I was teaching the English course.  I was on splits with Elder Smith and Thorpe because Elder McGlothin had to go up to Tirana with President Smith for some branch business.  So I taught the beginners course.  I told the noisy members that if they were going to talk that they had to leave.  That did nothing.  It was pretty annoying.  They don't really seem to understand what the purpose of this English course is.  So that will be a big thing we need to fix before we start up on Wednesday.  We have been passing out tons of fliers, so hopefully we have a good turn-out.

So both me and my companion have served in Lushnjë and Shkodër where work is slower than most places, and what we figured is that we must be getting some real serious blessings from enduring those hard areas.  It's pretty great.  Last transfer, we had hit our low at like 17 lessons one week (which would have been an awesome week in Shkodër), and after that, it has just kept going up.  It is really awesome.  Thanks for that object lesson about prayer as well.  I think people here will really enjoy that.

Anyways, I think that's about all for the week.  This next week seems like it will be even more jam-packed with work than this last week.  That's exciting.  In the 3 hours of proselyting today on P-day, we have 3 lessons planned.  It's already starting out pretty great.  Anyways, I will talk to you all next week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine