Dear family,

So I was looking at the list we have that has all the missionaries here in Albania and their phone numbers, and judging from what's on the sheet, I think I may be moving up to Tirana come transfers.  That still is a long ways out, but the only other cities I think I could possibly go to, I probably won't go.  That is all just my own reasoning and not really based on anything.  It would be weird serving in Tirana from what I've heard.  The branches there all have branch presidents that are Albanians, and they are pretty much self functioning so missionaries seem to only be doing missionary work instead of the branch being dependent on the missionaries for everything.  It is kind of fun serving in the outside zone (all the cities but Tirana) because it just seems more like an adventure.  In Lushnjë, it was just me and my companion, in Shkodër it was 4 missionaries total, and in Tirana, there's half the mission.  Here in Vlorë we have 4 elders, 2 sisters, and a senior couple.  I don't know if I just forget what it was like being stranded in Lushnjë, but I kind of miss being the only missionaries in a city.  I think if I end up going to Tirana, I may just spend as much time away from the rest of the missionaries as possible.

Anyways, this week we got a call from a member saying he had somebody we could teach, and so far, he is pretty golden.  He came to church on Sunday, and he actually sends us a text if he can't come for a lesson.  It's pretty cool.  We are planning on committing him to a baptismal date soon.  That would be awesome.  He also seems to already know all the members in the branch, so that is also really cool.  I talked to Elder Vance on the ride home from zone conference the other day, and he seems to be feeling good.  He and his companion in Lushnjë at the moment are just doing less active work.  It sounds like they have some good plans for the area.  I wouldn't mind going back to Lushnjë one day.  It is probably much easier when you can understand people.

I was talking to an elder here in my district while we were on exchanges, and we figured out that time on the mission just keeps speeding up because you continue improving with the language and everything, so you can do more and more.  At the beginning, I don't think too many of us are all that useful.  I have noticed that every passing transfer just seems to speed up.  I can see kind of how a mission can pass by without really noticing it.

I gave a talk in sacrament meeting on Sunday.  I love talks.  It is probably one of the easiest things that I could do on my mission.  I usually feel like I can speak the language just fine, but when it comes to understanding, that is usually a bigger problem.  Giving a talk is just the talking part, so that's not too bad.  Unfortunately, I've already served in the areas where I would be giving a ton of talks in church.  It is kind of fun serving in areas where the church isn't all that strong, even though it brings difficulties of its own like not being able to bring members to lessons (members are kind of preliminary to that) and church is often much shorter than it should be.

Anyways, not too much else happened this week, so I will just finish this now.  I sent the zone conference picture from zone conference even though I'm kind of hidden in the back.  You can see the tie I've been wearing practically every day of my mission in the picture though.  Anyways, have a good week.

Love,
Elder Uallentajn

Dear Family,

Boys camp was pretty great.  I enjoyed it a ton.  It seemed to come at the best time as well because it helped kind of serve as a break from the normal missionary life.  The day before I was feeling pretty frustrated with my companion and it just seemed like I was wound pretty tight.  Nothing like 3 days of soccer, volleyball, and chess to solve that.  I recently heard from a member here in Vlorë that last year at camp, the missionaries that went just kind of hung out with each other and not with any of the YM.  He was a little surprised he asked the YM about it and they said we played a lot with them.  I had realized on that camp how much I loved camping, and how much I like camping when I have a sleeping bag as well.  I didn't even have any blankets at the camp, so I was pretty much freezing both nights I was there.  Luckily, it warmed up pretty quick as soon as the morning came.  When camp ended, it seemed like I could just jump right back into the missionary schedule as well, so that was pretty nice.

We had transfer calls last Saturday, and they were not very exciting.  Everybody in Vlorë is staying exactly where they are.  I kind of miss parts of the beginning of my mission where I was moving all over the place, and now I will be in Vlorë for at least 6 months.  After this next transfer, I will have spent half my time in the country in Vlorë.  I have thought that it would be hilarious if my current companion ended up being the one transferred this next big transfer because he has been going around telling everybody about how he will be here the rest of his mission since he got here in Vlorë.  He would be pretty angry though.  He hates getting transferred.

Anyways, so I attached some photos to this email.  Some of them are from boys camp, some are from a castle we visited down in a place called Porto Polarmo or something like that, one is a picture of the twins we got baptized that was taken without me knowing thus the lack of me being in it, one is a picture of me and a bunch of the youth in Vlorë at the Berat castle, and another one is a picture I drew today while everyone was exchanging pictures from the transfer.  I had nothing else around, so I started drawing and so I sent the almost finished product.  I had to stop so we could come do email.

I know I have met someone with the last name of Smurthwaite.  I don't think we ever knew each other too well, but we've talked before.  I also have met Elder Vance, kind of.  I have at least seen him and know who he is.  There are only 40 missionaries here in Albania, so I at least know what every missionary here looks like.  Elder Vance was in Lushnjë before I came to the country, and now he is going back.  I told you all at some point how it was closed.  Well, apparently a member of the 70 didn't like that, so it is now reopened.  I guess there is a lot of less active work to be done there.  I don't think I'd mind serving there again now that I can actually speak the language somewhat.

I saw a quince for the first time of my life the other day.  It was pretty crazy.  It looked like a big lumpy pear.  I am totally going to eat one of those one day.  The word for it in Albania is ftua, and it changes just like the word dragua which means dragon.  So ftua, ftoi, ftoin, ftonj, ftonjtë, and ftonjve are all different forms of the word.  The first 3 are singular, and the last 3 are plural.  Some are definite, and others are in different cases.  It's fun.

I'm ready for the summer to end.  Sure being hot, sweaty, and sticky all day is fun and all, but a lot of members work throughout the summer and go to the beach, so it's harder to meet with people and less people come to church.  It's kind of a shame.  Hopefully, that can change soon.  There has been a change recently in the District Presidency here in Albania.  There was an American that worked for the government or something that has been the District president, but he has to go move to some country that I have no idea how to spell.  It's pretty crazy.  So now our whole district presidency is Albanian.  That is one great step forward I think.  It's pretty exciting.

We still have had enough work where it is hard to find any time to go tracting.  It's kind of cool.  We have been getting around 16-20 lessons a week as of late, and along with a lot of work we have in the branch, that fills up our schedule pretty quick.  I'm trying to get it so our lessons are a bit faster, but it's difficult because my companion likes to talk a lot and seems to go off topic quite a bit.  Luckily, I think me and my companion to get along better than we did several weeks ago, and we're starting to teach more in unity, and I've learned how to avoid arguments for the most part.

Well, I'm looking forward to getting those wedding invitations.  If it would be possible one of these days, would it be possible to send a USB drive or something?  I would buy one here, but they're pretty expensive.  Although, there's really no point to sending it on its own, so if you ever are sending something, if you remember a usb, go ahead and put it in.  I still have quite a few unused SD cards, so chances are I will not need anything like that for quite some time.

Anyways, thanks for everything, I'll talk to you all next week.

Love,
Elder Uallentajn

Dear family,

So today was another preparation day.  From about 6:30 in the morning until who knows when, we went down to this beach a bit further south than where we usually go, and just kind of hung out down there.  It was kind of cool, although there wasn't all that much to do there.  I ended up playing a game of chess with Elder Thorpe which ended up being a very close match.  Afterwards, we went to this restaurant called AFC (Albanian Fried Chicken).  The name probably sounds familiar.  That's because when you get into Albania, you enter a nice little bubble free of copyrights, and you can do whatever you want.  So they have look-a-like of McDonalds and KFC here.  It's pretty funny.  Elder Thorpe and I split a mini bucket of 24 hot wings (not quite all that spicy) and had french fries and drinks.  It was pretty good.  I also managed to win a game of Uno.

After lunch, we met the senior missionary couple at the bank so we could take care of some work we had there.  We just wanted to make a quick deposit and withdrawl, but apparently our names were not on the account still, so we couldn't make the withdrawl.  So we ended up spending 2 hours at the bank waiting for them to figure things out.  That wasn't too bad.  We basically just sat there talking to the couple the whole time.  It seems like we get to talk to them a ton since he's the branch president and my companion is the first counselor.  Anyways, I still feel pretty relaxed today, especially since I just looked at the cell phone and found out it is only 2:20 instead of 4:50 as the computer says.  That is closer to what it felt like.  That means I have 2 and a half hours more of p-day.

Anyways, the assistants came down this past week so they could interview our investigator that is to be baptized next week, so they went on exchanges with us.  It was pretty fun.  Elder Foulk (one of the assistants) and I were together, and after not being able to meet with several people, we started street contacting.  Then all of a sudden, a little boy ran up, stole my nametag, and threw it on a roof.  Luckily, I have a backup name tag that is spelt how it would be pronounced in Albanian.  So now I'm Elder Uallentajn.  It's pretty cool.

So, I just got a phone call from the mission president as I was typing the last paragraph, and I found out that I am going to be going to boys camp!  That will be happening the day after our investigator's baptism.  So that is going to be awesome.  We basically get to teach the young men how to do camping and scouting stuff like set up tents and light fires.  It's going to be awesome.  That is also the week of zone conference and transfer calls, so it's just going to be a nonstop week of excitement.  Weekly planning is going to be extremely easy for that week.  Numberwise, it will probably be our worst week ever.  That is probably understood though since we will be put somewhat out of comission for 4 days of the week.  We'll probably have the other elders take care of a lot of our work those days we're at camp.  I'm pretty excited.

Anyways, this week, we ended up getting like 5 new investigators.  I have also started a little calendar thing where I am now working on things that I should be doing, but noticed I had been kind of slacking on them.  Stuff like waking up on time and doing language study and SYL every day.  I made a list of quite a few things like that, and then have been marking off each day I do each one.  It's been working pretty well.  It feels more rewarding when I can mark my progress.

Well, I think that's about all I got for this week.  

Love,

Elder Wallentine

Dear family,

I think the stress from last week was coming a lot because of my current companion.  It was just his whole take on Vlorë for the first couple weeks.  We just seem to have completely different modes of doing anything, so it is a little hard to adjust.  He seems to be more of a pessimistic person a lot of times, and he will usually tell me how bad he thinks people are.  He will also tell me how great the people are when he thinks they are great.  I think I've adjusted quite a bit now.  My companion seems to be really cool, it's just doing missionary work with people a lot of times seems to pull out a lot of our faults we don't see otherwise.  It's somewhat annoying.

Anyways, there was a district leader training up in Tirana last Thursday, so my companion had to head up there while I went on exchanges with an elder in Fier.  This elder has 3 months in the country at the moment, so it was cool to be on exchanges with someone with less time than me.  We spent a day in Fier where we taught his English course and met a couple members.  I then heard a strange rumor that apparently I hated this certain crazy member in Fier.  The lady is pretty crazy and views real life as if it were a soap opera, but I had no idea how anyone could have thought I hated her.  This lady came along after English class and sat down with me wanting to talk.  She apparently had thought I had pushed her out of a van as we were going to district conference 4 weeks ago.  I was not even in that van at the time.  So I cleared that up, and then she went off on how everyone pretty much needs to help her out or else they are bad people.  I told her something I think Elder Perry had said at some point about laughing when times get hard, but I'm not sure how much that did for her.  Fier has some pretty interesting people.

The next day I had with this elder from Fier was spent in Vlorë.  We had several good meetings, and when we went tracting later on, we got in our first door, and then we got invited in to another guy's house.  The first guy was not too interested in the end, and the second guy didn't want to talk about religion at all.  It was still pretty good though.  We then met with the guy with a baptismal date, and he is still doing great.  He didn't come to church last Sunday because his work randomly called him in on Sunday.  That was a bummer, but his whole family came.

Lately, it seems like we've been having a difficult time finding new investigators.  I think we need to start asking for more referrals since it seems like most of our time is being taken up by actual meetings.  We don't have too much time to go tracting, so I think we will have to run off referrals.

There was this member here that is pretty darn good but rather prideful, and he was offended by one of the missionaries here, and he didn't come to church last week for the first time since I've been here in Vlorë.  I was a bit worried about that, but this past Sunday, he came back, and I think he's back to stay.  He wanted to talk to the mission president when he came down here, so I went to translate.  As it turns out, I was pretty useless since president understands Albanian pretty well, this member understands English, and both are pretty good at Italian.  There were a couple times when I needed to clarify something for the other, but I basically just sat there as 3 languages were being thrown back and forth.  That was a cool experience.  The member requested a couple missionaries he wanted to go up to boys camp, and I was one of them, so that was a little awkward being there for that, but it would be super cool if I ended up going.  President said he would think about it, but that it may not happen, so chances are pretty good that I'm not going, but it'd be really cool.

There are 2 people that I think would be very promising to have baptismal dates... that is, if we can ever meet with them.  Their names are Mario and Eva, and both are really good, but we have never been able to meet with them because they are so busy all the time.  We've got a couple methods we are going to pull out to try to fix this matter, so we'll see how that goes.  There are just a couple things left that we need to do in order to help a couple other investigators progress towards baptism, but it may take some time.

In Albanian, I've started saying "Mirushafshim" (mee-roo-shah-fsheem) which means "May we insult each other well".  It's fun because it's really close to "Mirupafshim" (mee-roo-pah-fsheem) which is pretty much just their word for goodbye.

I recently heard that transfers are going to happen less often now.  Apparently, one of the area presidencies came and told president that companionships should be together for longer periods of time.  By the sounds of things, missionary work all over the world is experiencing a couple slight changes, but it shouldn't be all that bad.  Anyways, that's all I really have for this past week.  So I will talk with you all next week.

Love,
Elder Wallentine