Dear family,

First, I did receive that object lesson book as well as the beehives' letters.  Thanks a lot.  I got a great idea when I got it that I could start trying to translate a lot of them into Albanian which could really help some of the current teachers here in Albania as well.  I talked to this member here named Ganjel who is the YM's president, and he is usually not very open to knew ideas.  However, I told him about one of the object lessons, and he told me I could teach that part, and he could do the rest.  It went well, although it was only the Friday night activity where only 1 other member showed up.  I think it was announced that it had ended due to some miscommunication, but I will make sure that gets fixed.  I forgot to announce it at church yesterday, so we may not end up having an activity on Friday this week.  That's a bummer, but we'll see what happens.

So I got an assignment from President Smith yesterday.  The Smiths are the missionary couple here serving as branch president.  Anyways, there's this member here that he is particularly worried about.  He could be a great asset to this branch here in Vlorë, or he could really hurt it.  At the moment, it appears like he is coming close to the crossroads where he will choose.  Lucky for me, I am the missionary that has been here in Vlorë the longest amount of time at the moment (besides Sister Hall who doesn't really know this member too well), so it is my job to help him out a bit.  We'll see how this all works out.

We found this really cool guy tracting the other day.  His name is Milo, and he is an 81 year old guy who knows 6 languages.  It's pretty crazy.  It doesn't seem like he changes his opinion too easily, mainly about baptism, so that could be difficult.  He is still really cool and open to what we have to say.  He also helped turn one of our days around.  Near the beginning of last week, we went up to meet one of our old baptismal dates, and the meeting went pretty out of hand.  This was the girl who had gotten hit by the car, and when we met with them, the mom was apparently really stressed out from work, so she took the stress out on us missionaries.  So at the time we were worried that we would no longer be able to go over there.  It was right after that when we had our first meeting with Milo, and he really brightened up the day.

Last Saturday, we went down near the neighborhood of the girl who got hit by the car, and she told us we could still teach them, but not right after their mom gets home from work.  The only problem now is meeting with the oldest daughter and getting the three girls to church.  Luckily, these 3 all still seem to have desires to get baptized, so the mom is currently the only problem.  I know she doesn't have work on Sundays, so maybe we could go over then when she could possibly be less stressed.  We'll see how things go.

Last week, we had 2 investigators tell us that they were going to be coming to church on Sunday, but neither ended up coming.  That was a little annoying.  Also, none of our deacons were wearing white shirts or ties, so we were lacking people to pass the sacrament.  We are going to talk to people this week, and hopefully next week can be better.  Looking just at the numbers from last week to this week, we improved in almost everything.  So that's good.  I think we still have a lot to work on, so we'll be pretty busy this week.  We probably need to start meeting with members more often.  Being in its first generation here, we probably need to strengthen our current members as much as possible.

Anyways, That's all for this week, and I'm out of time.  So, I will send another email next week.

Love,
Elder Wallentine