Hey family,

Thanksgiving was pretty fun.  It was kind of just a shortened zone conference followed by a huge Thanksgiving dinner and a movie.  We did end up watching Toy Story 3.  It was pretty funny.  After the movie, I was a little bummed because Thanksgiving flew by so quickly, and we had no lessons for the rest of the night.  It was a little hard to start working.  But, now things are going back to normal.  I'm not sure exactly what the motivation of the Orthodox deacon is for getting all these books.  It seems like he's interested.  He's met with missionaries before, and he seems to have a good view of us and the church.  The people in Germany I mentioned are the people in charge of the area that contains Albania.  I think that's where the center for the European area is or something. 

This past week, we hardly had any lessons, but one of our investigators on Sunday morning called us up saying he was going to come to church.  He was only able to come for the first hour, but it was good.  So we still managed to have some sort of success this week.  Last Saturday, there was a branch activity where we watched the Testaments with Albanian subtitles.  So now I know how to say "You are a specter from the gods" in Albanian.  It was a good activity.  This month seems like it'll be a pretty crazy month.  On the 17 or 18, there will be a branch Christmas activity, on the 24, there is a district Christmas activity, and on New Year's Eve, we get to see the crazy display of fireworks.  I've seen pictures, and it's pretty insane.  Meanwhile, in between all that, we will be finding and teaching people.  I think this week we have quite a few people who will be able to meet with us.  Hopefully the meetings go through.

In 2 days, I will finish my last November on my mission.  So that's fun.  As for a Christmas package, I think that traditional stuff would be great.  Especially jerky.  That stuff was pretty delicious last year. Always remember: "It's not nice to be fat, but it's phat to be nice." Anyways, have a good week.

Love,
Elder Wallentine

Dear family,

I finished Jesus the Christ the other day.  We also gave a copy to the Orthodox Priest that seems to be meeting us and getting as many books from us as he can.  I do wonder what he'll think when he reads the section about the great apostasy.  The last meeting we had with him, I shared a scripture in D&C that talked about various items about the plan of salvation, and he had a question that was difficult for me and my companion to answer.  Sometimes it's hard to explain some of these things, but as soon as you explain it the right way, it makes lots of sense.

Anyways, the other day I was looking at this Doctrine and Covenants study manual and read a little section that talked about how God is able to do anything, but sometimes he doesn't do things because we're not ready for those things to happen.  So that can be motivation to try to be ready to get whatever he wants to give us.

Anyways, last week, even though we were down in Fier for a day and a half for trainings, we ended up getting more success than last week.  We finally were able to contact this referral some members gave us, and we found a new investigator when we were tracting last Tuesday.  Hopefully we continue to have success.  We just finished another transfer, and everybody in the mission but 4 people stayed the same.  So no changes here in Durrës.  The other day, I called up this inactive member, said I was a missionary, and he hung up right away.  I have a feeling he's not interested.  We are having a hard time contacting and finding the couple families we got from the branch president.  We will be starting an English course on December 1, and up to now, we've heard responses from 6-7 people, which is quite a good amount of students.  Hopefully that will result in a couple new investigators.

Last Thursday, after the training, we ended up going to Lushnjë for the night to work there.  So I got a little more time there.  I don't know if I had said this before, but the people in Germany said that Lushnjë should be opened back up a while ago.  So there are some missionaries there that work in Lushnjë, but they still work in Fier as well.  They wanted Lushnjë open for the sake of the few members we did have there.  Hopefully something happens down there in Lushnjë and work starts moving again.  As for now, it's about as slow as ever.

Anyways, not too much else happened this week.  Hope all is well back at home.  Bëj të fala të gjithëve!  (give everyone my regards)

Love,
Elder Wallentine

Dear family,

So the most exciting thing this week was when we were street contacting and I stopped this Muslim guy.  After hearing me out, he explained how the Bible, Koran, and some other book were kind of like 3 glasses of water and we had to try them all to find out which one was the best.  He had a lot of similar views of how we can find the truth, but he ended up leaving and we never saw him again... or so we thought.  We continued street contacting, and a second guy came along, obviously muslim from his huge beard, and he started talking to us about Islam and gave me a DVD explaining the importance of forgiveness in Islam.  They have some different word for the forgiveness they get, but I can't remember it.  Right after he left, the first muslim guy came with a friend, and they said they wanted to talk with us.  So we sat down and started talking.  They talked a ton about how we should read the Koran so we can see that it is true, and they had even printed off a piece of the Koran to have us read.  They used analogies, and all in all they seemed to be pretty good teachers... except they interrupted a lot and didn't ask any questions at all.  That's probably how some of us missionaries look.  So we basically threw a couple cool analogies back and forth, and I shared some scripture from the Book of Mormon.  They ended up leaving because they had to get to the Mosque for the prayer call, which kind of relieved me and my companion, because we started talking about the time lunch was supposed to start, and finished talking the time it was supposed to end.  So we had lunch a bit later that day.

So that's the story of how 2 Muslims tried converting me to Islam.  Meanwhile, we recently received 2 referrals from members, and have a couple returns for tracting that will hopefully bring some more results, so that's exciting.  This week we also were able to catch up on all the bills that were unpaid due to the negligence of previous missionaries.  But now it's all set in order.  I know at least older members know about holidays like Thanksgiving from talking to missionaries, but I'm not sure how widely known it is here.  I just know that on Thanksgiving we have a special zone conference thing where we are all going to get together (as 2 zone conferences happening in the same place at the same time) and we'll do zone conference followed by watching a movie.  From what I hear, there's a good chance of us watching Toy Story 3, but we'll see.

Anyways, I'm almost done reading Jesus the Christ, and I just finished the portion that talked about Christ going to the Spirit world.  It was crazy to read about all the trials and stuff that Christ had to go through.  The book pointed out every single thing that was illegal about what they had done to convict him to death, and in the end, they couldn't convict him guilty of anything legally.  One of my favorite responses from Jesus was when somebody hit him, and he said something like: If I have spoken evil, why am I not convicted?  If I have spoken good, why do you hit me?  Something like that.  Just every time he spoke, nobody had any clue what to say.  That's a pretty good book.

The weather is starting to get colder, but it's still not too bad. I'll keep you updated in a week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine

Dear family,

Right now, the branch is doing alright.  It's kind of nice to be in a branch where the problems that missionaries have had to solve are now solved by members of the church.  Also, we have received a couple referrals from members that we will hopefully be contacting soon.  There are also a couple people from the area book we should be meeting.  From how things are looking, this week should be pretty successful.  Hopefully we can get some progressing investigators soon.

Last Thursday, my companion had a leadership training meeting up in Tirana, so I got to go to Tirana as well.  I didn't go to the meeting, but I was on exchanges with Elder Thorpe once again.  Me and Elder Thorpe were in the same district back when I was in Shkodër for a month and a half, then again in the same district in Vlorë for 4 and a half months.  In Shkodër, we also went on quite a few exchanges with each other, and we had a couple exchanges down in Vlorë too.  I think we have probably gone on more exchanges with each other than anybody else.  It's fun.  Also, he was telling me how he had recently decided to become a better missionary.  He had been kind of struggling with the mission and everything, but on this exchange, he seemed 100% different than what I'd seen before.  If he keeps it up, I think he'll be a really good missionary.  I was pretty impressed.

Two days later on Saturday, we went down to Vlorë for a baptism of Rinald, one of my investigators in Vlorë.  I got to baptize him in the sea, so that was cool.  It was pretty hard since there were tons of waves coming at us.  There was almost an unfortunate happening however.  While we were all getting prepared for the baptism, we hear this crash sound, and we looked up and saw the car of one of the members smashed against a pole.  The place we had the baptism was a beach that was next to the road that was elevated about 3 stories.  Apparently, the car had lost its brakes or something, so they went running into the pole.  The pole ended up saving them.  Also, had they been just a foot or so to the right, they would have gone flying off the cliff into tons of sharp rocks below.  Luckily, nobody was harmed.  Anyways, the baptism went well, and nobody died.  I also got to meet a couple of the new missionaries who came into the country in October.  That was fun.  I also had a good time talking to some members there as well as Elder Warburton who is still there in Vlorë.

Today, we went to this city called Kruj (Kroo-ee) where we saw this museum of Skënderbeu, who is this legendary hero of Albania who had apparently chased the Turks from Albania.  He's revered by pretty much everybody here.  They also had a ton of cool shops there full of a lot of cool nik naks.  I enjoyed it.  Elder Castro-Guzman and I were also able to get through a couple games of chess on the way there.

I'm not sure exactly what holidays are big here.  I know that I haven't seen too much big hustle and bustle around here while I've been here.  I think they might celebrate Valentine's day, they at least know about it.  In the church, we have a district Christmas party in December, so we at least celebrate that in the church.  There are the Muslim holidays like Ramadan and since many people here are Muslim, there are a lot who do that.  That is, if Ramadan counts as a holiday.  I think at the end of it they at least have the big feast thing.  Anyways, New Years, from what I've seen and heard, is the biggest holiday here in Albania.

So far, there are only branches here in Albania.  We have a building here in Durrës, but I think the attendance dropped a couple years back, so there are about the same amount of people coming here as there were going to church in Vlorë.  I think Vlorë typically had more people.  Durrës is going pretty well.  We should be contacting a member referral this Saturday, we received a new referral yesterday, and we should be meeting with a former investigator tonight that we found in the area book.  So hopefully that all works out.

Albania is not in the European Union, and I've heard of several things that would continue to keep them out of it such as the lack of regard for copyrights.  However, I have seen and heard recently that there have been meetings recently that could make it so Albanians no longer need Visas to travel throughout Europe.

Love,

Elder Wallentine

Dear family,

So the funny thing about the 2 investigators named Kristaç from last week is that Kristaç isn't all that common of a name here.  Mario is fairly common, although we meet about a bazillion Gëzims, Besims, and Shpëtims. (Their names mean Joy, Faith, and Salvation, all of which are male names)  There are also men named Yllber which means rainbow.  The names are funny when we look at their meanings.

This past week, Elder Castro-Guzman got a new pen.  I think it is a fountain pen.  The pen was 300 lekë ($3) and the bottle of ink was 150 lekë ($1.50).  I was surprised and wondered why anybody would spend $4.50 on a pen.  Later on, I found out how long that was going to last him, and realized it ended up being a rather reasonable price even for someone who doesn't care about pens like me.  So I ended up buying one too.  It writes really well.  It's kind of fun.

So you know you've spent a long time in Albania when you see a small cement square surrounded by solid cement/brick buildings with a falling apart fence surrounding a small cement soccer field and you think it looks like fun.  There's not all that much grass around here.  Albania makes me think of a giant cement parking lot sometimes.  Just how everything you see is made out of cement.  Rarely can you look anywhere and not see cement.  Luckily, cementiness doesn't have too much of an effect on missionary work.

Last night, we were street contacting, and a German guy came, and he couldn't really speak English or Albanian.  He tried communicating, for what and why I still am clueless.  I was able to pick a couple things out of his German like zehr goed (or something like that, I can't spell German) and weinig; basically stuff that was close to dutch that I happened to still remember.  However, none of our languages worked together, so our conversation was just stagnant and not going anywhere.  I just understood that he really liked Germany, but said how Albania was "slecht", which I think means bad.  He said it meant no good, so I think bad would be a good translation.

Anyways, not too much else happened this week.  A couple kids yesterday wished me a happy Halloween, so that was cool.  They don't celebrate it here, but people still know about it.  I assume it's similar to how we know about Cinco de Mayo.  One thing I do know they celebrate is New Years.  I will have to get some pictures of that.  I've seen some photos and videos of other missionaries, and it looks insane.  I heard somewhere that we aren't allowed to go outside during New Years.  I'm pretty excited for it.  Anyways, that's all I got for this week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine