2-8-2010

"Alright so I don’t have tons to write in this email so hopefully you don’t mind that it will be a little shorter. First off the football game went great. I had two goals and we won!! I had a pretty big ball hog on my team which kind of stunk but I still made the best out of it. A few times I actually stole the ball from him to pass it to another one of our teammates, lol, He was so angry at me. But that’s what he gets for being like that. I don’t remember the end score but we won easily. This Saturday I’m trying to convince the other elders to get a bunch of kids together and as our weekly service project we can show them how to play baseball. So hopefully I will be playing baseball this Saturday but we will see…. So I weighed myself a few days ago and I am at 202. Im pretty happy but the sad thing is that I know it isn’t good weight, lol. But when it comes summer I will hopefully have a companion that likes to run and I will
be able to turn some of it into muscle. But as long as I’m not losing weight I’ll be happy. Every Sunday we eat at a women’s house we call Motra Lika and she always feeds us huge meals. She is the one that we ate a whole fish actually, lol. Usually they are good the fish was just an off day because this Sunday it was really good. Anyways she told me to tell you to mos kini merak dhe mos kini frike which means done be worried or scared because im in good hands here, she also did a bej te fala which in English we don’t have so the best way I can explain it is that she gives you a shout out and says wuz up, lol. I think that’s a good way to explain bej te fala.
I only have one funny story that happened to me this week. We were tracting a communist stairwell and when you go in there is a gate but they are always open so we just walk in and start at the top of the building which is usually 4 or 5 floors for a communist building and we start at the top because I think its easier to walk down the stairs after getting rejected rather than walk up them. So anyways we get to the bottom and get shut down at all the doors that open and we get to the bottom and the door is closed and locked, lol. We were like you have to be kidding me. I wanted to go up one more floor and just jump over the little edging but my companion was to scared so we started pressing buttons trying to tell people we are stuck in the stairwell and we want out but I think they thought we were dumb boys and wanted in, lol. So finally an old little grandma comes down and she cant get the door open so then another really old grandma comes down
and has keys and cant open it. And its funny because just a few minutes ago they were really rude to us at their door but after sitting they for 20 minutes laughing about what was happening they realized we were nice boys and we had a good conversation with them. Then finally we were able to find a way to open it and escape to our meeting we had. That was the only fun/exciting thing that happened to me this week. We have 3 people that are really close to baptism. One we will have a baptism date for this week and then the other two we should hopefully set a date next week. I have been lucky to be in such a good area here in Tirana e Re. The members are awesome and the work has just been amazing. I have been involved with 2 baptisms so far, Grei and Kein the two boys. And now we have 1 that will be baptized at the end of February or early March hopefully and the other 2 will hopefully be around that time also. It has been awesome teaching them
and being able to watch them grow in the gospel. It’s funny because we are teaching two kids right now who aren’t close to baptism yet but the first day I met them I remember thinking that these kids weren’t going to go anywhere because they just didn’t pay attention and were just two punks basically but we have been meeting them once or twice a week for a few months now and they have changed a lot. They have begun reading the Book of Mormon and one of them is trying to stop smoking. It has been cool to see there desire to change and just become better individuals through the gospel. Our next step is trying to get them to stop fighting because they always meet with us and have some crazy fight story, lol. They are awesome though and hopefully one day they will be ready for baptism."