Dear family,

So this week, we had a pretty cool thing happen.  On Wednesday, there was this leadership training thing my companion had to go to, so I went on exchanges with Elder Castro-Guzman (my former french companion) and Elder Owens.  Elder Owens has served up in Shkodër his whole mission, and apparently he's trying really hard to speak Shkodrancë, or the dialect of Albanian up in Shkodër.  Meanwhile, I try to speak as close to how written Albanian is, so we sound completely different when speaking Albanian.  We basically just street contacted all morning, went to lunch, and then headed to the mission home to get back with our companions.  Me and my companion then went tracting, and we end up finding this lady who told us she had seen me and the other two guys in the road that morning, and that she had thought about talking to us, but then didn't because she figured we were in school or something.  So she let us in, and we had a lesson with her and her daughter.  Later on the dad came home from work, so we filled him in on what we had just talked about.  In the end of the lesson, the daughter even said the closing prayer.  So that was cool.  We have been trying to go back to meet with them again, but they've been somewhat busy.

Last Friday, we went to a recently baptized family's house who told us about the tsunami.  They said it had hit a part of Russia or China as well as Japan.  That's pretty crazy.  Luckily, I don't think Albania is in a prime spot for tsunamis.  It would have to get past Italy first.  I would hope I never have to deal with a tsunami.  I never got to see any Surviving Disaster episodes on tsunamis, so I would have no idea what to do.  In case of hurricanes, plane hijacks, house arrest, and being lost at sea I'll be fine.  House arrest is easy because I just don't work at a bank.

There is a little kid here that lives near our house that always says "Hello" to us.  He doesn't know English very well, but he greets us in English all the time.  When I was in Durrës, there were some kids by our house who would always yell "Hello, how are you good night!" whenever they saw us.  It was funny.  I recently learned a couple words in Albanian: aksh and ankth.  Aksh means so-and-so, and ankth means nightmare.

Yesterday we had a training in church where us missionaries tried to get the branch pumped up to do some member missionary work.  We'll be going around meeting with members and try to get some referrals and stuff like that soon.  I think it all went rather well so far.

Not too much else happened this week, so that's it.

Love,
Elder Wallentine