Dear family,

So this past week was pretty interesting.  Things were falling through quite a bit, but for the most part, we got quite a few happening.  I think I mentioned how the water bills hadn't been paid for about 4 years at some point.  A couple weeks ago we paid them, and now they've shut off our water. So we've been living out in Laprakë again.  The house there is really nice, so it's not too bad, it just stinks that we aren't living in our area anymore.

I've had to teach 3rd hour of church the past couple weeks because the teacher has been gone or sick. The youth just came back from EFY, and this week is a YSA conference.  On Saturday, we had to wake up at 4:00 am so we could get to the church by 6:30 to fill up the baptismal font by 10:30 am. Then, there was another baptism at 6:00pm, so we just didn't empty it.  There are these 3 brothers that are 26, 23, and 17 years old who are all members now.  That's good since we need some Melchizedek Priesthood holders for a stake.

On Sunday we were finally able to meet this guy who has been coming to church for quite some time, but is not a member.  He already knows a lot about the church, and we're hoping to be able to set a baptismal date in the near future.  In our zone, there are 17 baptismal dates.  That is pretty awesome. Many of those are set for 10 September.  So we'll have a fun month.

Other than all that, not too much happened this week.  Have a good week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine

Dear family,

So this past week we were unable to meet with the 3 boys we were hoping to get baptismal dates throughout the week, so we didn't end up getting one with them.  Today we'll do a baptismal calendar where we can help them see what they need to do to be baptized.  Hopefully we can start meeting more than once a week.  Another investigator we found has read quite a bit of the Book of Mormon and he is looking really promising.  He's understanding everything he's reading, and we told him last meeting that he needed to start praying about it every day as well.  He was under the impression that he was only supposed to pray here in church.  I'm really hoping he gets baptized before the end of my mission.  He also has a family, so that would be a great addition to the branch here.

This next week we have zone conference and we are in charge of getting all the assignments out to everybody.  We'll be a little busy with that tomorrow.  Today we played football in the morning and then left on a gondola to go to the top of a mountain called Mount Dajti.  It was pretty cool.  I also got a lot of mini Korans for you all back at home.  They're in Arabic and everything.  I also bought a CD by a guy named Alban Skënderaj for $3, and there are 16 songs on the cd.  It's pretty cool.

We had a meeting this past week with this guy named Drini who is protestant and wanted to have a discussion about religion and stuff.  I gave him a Book of Mormon and he seemed like he was going to read it.  Hopefully he does.  He doesn't really see why God needed to make another set of scriptures, so hopefully we can clear that up.

Anyways, that's basically all I got for this week.  Have a good one.

Love,

Elder Wallentine

Dear family,

This week we went on exchanges with the office elders.  That was fun.  I spent a day with Elder Holmes in the office, and it ended up being quite eventful.  In the morning we were going to go see the old Yugoslavian embassy with President Ford.  The old embassy is going to be our new church here in Tirana.  It is really, really big.  It will be great to have that.  From what I hear, it's going to be a temporary kind of thing until they get a stake center that will be a ways away.  They're just hoping that in 5-10 years when they have the stake center that most people will have cars to be able to go the distance to church.  Also, that morning, we got a phone call saying that the 3 computers at the institute room at the church were stolen.  We were hoping to get there to see windows and stuff broken so we knew that the person who stole the computers didn't have keys, but the only thing broken was the gate hiding the computers.  So that was interesting.

There's an inactive family that has been coming back to church recently.  Elder Smith and I had started meeting with them, and now the mom and dad have been coming to church.  So far, they are yet to come together, but they have both come twice.  They both came to a baptism yesterday, so that was cool.  They have been coming to 2nd branch lately, but yesterday the dad came to 4th branch, so that's great that he's coming back to his own branch.  It's good to see them back.

This week felt really busy, so we were pretty tired by the end of it.  The last couple days, we hardly got any lunch at all.  It's nice to be busy, but sometimes we need a little break.  I could probably take a week long vacation if I could take back all my lost lunch time throughout my mission.  That'd be cool, but probably wouldn't be allowed.

Anyways, today we are planning on meeting 2 of our new investigators followed by three boys who we're hoping to give a baptismal date today.  We'll see how all that goes.  Have a good week!

Love,
Elder Wallentine

Dear mom,

Being at this point in the mission is kind of funny.  I think I was more trunky at the beginning of my mission than I am now.  There are some times where I think about what I'm going to do after my mission, but for the most part everything outside of the mission just seems foreign to me.  Kind of like life is just an ongoing mission or something.  It's probably not going to hit very quickly that I'm done.  We're already halfway through another transfer, and it seems we've just gotten together.  My companion and I are getting along great so far, and I feel like we're having a positive influence on the zone.  We've been going on a lot of exchanges lately so we can be with every companionship in our zone, and so far everything is going great.  Very few concerns so far.

So, recently, I bought 2 new albanian ties.  Surprising considering how much I really don't usually care about ties.  I've bought 3 now, which is very few in comparison to some other missionaries.  My companion probably has around 50 or so.  Ties here are anywhere from $5-$15, and the $10 and $15 ties are pretty good quality.  I think I'm done buying ties for myself though.

We had a pretty cool week.  Earlier, we were searching through the area book and I was calling people.  I got into "area book mode" where I call people up and just expect it to say that the number no longer exists and we clean out the area book a bit.  Finally, somebody answered the phone, and it was this lady saying we could go over right then.  So we went to where she said her house was, but a different person answered the door.  She let us in, and we found 2 new investigators.

Later on, we contacted 3 boys that are sons of a member, and we've been teaching them.  Thus 3 more investigators.  Then, we met this other guy we called from the area book, and we are beginning to meet him as well.  A bit ago, we were also street contacting, and I got a lady's phone number which I gave to the sisters.  They in turn gave me a number.  We met up with him last week and set up a time to meet tomorrow.  So this week we got a total of 7 new investigators.  It was awesome.  Also 5 investigators came to church on Sunday.

On another note, this morning we went to a park and played football because a bunch of members wanted to play it with us.  So we got there, and there were 2 members and 12 missionaries.  It was pretty fun.  Anyways, have a good week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine