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