Dear family,

So I recently met this guy from Kuwait who was really Muslim.  I went to the Mosque last Monday to once again try to get an English Koran, but the Imam, the guy in charge, wasn't there.  This guy was, and he tried finding one for me, but he couldn't.  We met with him on Tuesday, because he was going back to Kuwait the next day.  He works in the oil companies with a lot of English and American people, so he spoke really good English.  He had heard a little about our religion, but not too much.  He had heard that we practiced polygamy, and when I said we didn't anymore, he was like "Why?  That's too bad."  or something like that.  Here is how Muslim he was: He lives in the middle east, has a beard, 1 wife from Albania, 1 wife from Russia, goes to the mosque, speaks Arabic, and has 12 kids.  He told us something interesting that would be fun to bring up in a pointless argument with another Christian hating on the polygamy thing.  In the Koran, I guess it says that a person can have 2, 3, or 4 wives, but if a man cannot treat them equally, he should only marry one.  The guy said that the Koran is the only holy book anywhere that says to only marry one wife.  That was interesting.

Anyways, this week went pretty well.  We have started meeting with this investigator who had been really busy for quite a while, so that's cool.  There is also this guy named Bledari who we started meeting with yesterday, and he was really cool as well.  As we left the church, he was saying how he was doing martial arts, and then he showed us something.  He ran at the wall, and did one of those back flips where they jump off the wall.  It was pretty cool.  I'd only seen that kind of thing on youtube before.

Anyways, the new president is cool. This next week the president is going to have interviews with all the missionaries, and he wants to go out to do missionary work with one companionship from each district.  I think from that he will be able to see where we're at and what needs to be done.  So if anything really starts happening, it will probably be within the next month or so.  I have a feeling he could possibly be more strict, but we'll see.  President Neil just kind of told us what we needed to do, let us govern ourselves, and then he corrected things if necessary.  We'll see what President Ford does. This Friday is transfer calls, so we'll see what happens.  President Neil had a transfer sheet filled out with what he wanted to happen, but with the new president, nobody can really predict anything.  At the end of this week, I will have finished my last 7 week transfer of the mission.  Then I just have two 6-week transfers left.

I don't think there's much chance that I'll go to Kosovo.  Missionaries that go there can only be there for 3 months at the most, and I only have 3 months left.  Also, I just got into this area as a zone leader, so I don't think that I'll be moving.  There's a small chance that I could go, but I think it's unlikely.  I would enjoy it though.  I talked to one of the elders from Kosovo the other day and he said that the branch president there is from Belgium.  That was interesting.  They speak Albanian up in Kosovo, but they have a different accent, they use some different words, and I think they might write the language differently.  I do have this book called Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit that is the old law of Albania in the north, and it is written in the Gheg accent of Albanian.  So words change like: fëmijë = fmi, shtëpi = shpi, and një = nji.  It is kind of funny also because "që" is written "qi" in the book, and that is a bad word in Albanian.  Që is also a commonly used word.  It means "that".  I heard that that is how they write in Kosovo, but I'm not sure.

So far, I think my one sentence for my mission would be: I did my best, I have no regrets.

  

Anyways, that's all I got for this week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine