Dear Family,
As you can probably tell from the subject, I've got quite the story to tell you all. We started off the week working really hard and looking forward to some really cool things that were going to happen. Just a glimpse at the beginning of the week: we had three new investigators by the time that Thursday came around and we had only taught five lessons. That's really cool. One of our investigators' name is Saša (Sasha - yes that's a guy's name here) and he's really cool. We found him in the phone so we decided to call him and when he met with us we found out that he had met with the missionaries about a year ago and doesn't know why they stopped meeting with him. I didn't think too much of that other than I needed to find his record and find out what happened. So he said that he'd like to meet with us again and that we could probably do that later in the week, so we were super stoked for that - Someone that wants to meet with us! Sadly, the other two new investigators were dropped because they didn't come to their next meetings. That seems to be the trend right now.
So anyway, back to the subject. Come Wednesday night, we prayed and went to bed like always, however, at about five in the morning (one and a half hours before we were supposed to get up) I woke up and heard a really loud and strange hissing noise in the house. I was really tired so I just lay there in bed listening to it for a moment. (By the way, something really strange has happened here on the mission - from about day one, I've become a pretty light sleeper... I can't say that I particularly like that.) So after about three or four minutes of listening to this noise, I got curious enough to get out of bed, even though I just wanted to sleep. I just followed the noise and realized that it was coming from the bathroom, so I headed in that direction. When I put my foot down into the hallway that leads to the bathroom, however, I didn't find tile first, I found... SNAKES! No, I'm just kidding, it was water. Being still half asleep, I didn't really think much of it other than, "Oh look, there's water on the floor. Is there usually water here?" I kept going and got into the bathroom and found water flying everywhere and then I kind of woke up and thought, "Oh... there's something wrong here." I found out that the water was coming from the direction of the window (and we keep all the windows open at night because it gets hot and stuffy) so I thought that it was raining rediculously hard outside and so I slammed the window shut, but when the water continued just the same as before I shut the window, then I got really confused. (Also, realize that I was still pretty sleepy and stupid at this point even though I was getting sprayed and soaked with water.) So I looked down and realized even closer that the water was coming from the direction of the toilet! So I put my hand over the top of the toilet to see if the water was shooting out of the bowl, but strangely enough it wasn't. This whole situation got more and more confusing by the second. I had no idea really what was going on. Finally, I saw that the little tube running from the wall to the toilet was the source of the water so I immediately tried grabbing it to stop the water, my brain still not working, and then turning the little knob next to the wall to try and shut off the water. That didn't work, so I yelled to Elder Page to get him up. I yelled about two or three times and then he came in really asleep, like, "Hi? Oh, there's water everywhere. Isn't that sumthin?" As soon as he finally found out what was going on, he and I started running around the house trying to find where we could shut the water off. Elder Page found it and we shut it off. By this point, it was about 5:15 and we had around two to three centimeters of water on the floor. Once the water was shut off, we started cleaning up the water. We tried using the dust pan, but that didn't really work well enough and I wanted to get back to bed, so I ended up just using one of my towels and squeezing it out into the tub. We got the whole thing cleaned up in about thirty minutes, and then we looked at the damage to the toilet that caused this whole problem. Turns out that the tube running to the toilet at this time had completely split through and was sitting in two pieces - the one attached to the toilet, and the other to the wall. We took it off and decided that we were going to go and buy the new part later that day, but as for the moment, we went and tried to sleep again, but we were all wet, so it was a little miserable.
Later when I asked Elder Page what he thought when I woke him up, he said that he had two ideas. The first one was that our alarm clocks hadn't gone off and that we'd overslept, so I was yelling to him to wake him up, but then he heard the hissing noise, and assumed that I was making bacon for him! What good ideas. When I woke up, I was just really confused. When we woke up, we realized that we didn't have any water so we we had to go to the other elders' apartment so we could use the bathroom and shower and stuff so we just took everything that we'd need for the morning, including our study materials so we could just stay there and study. Later, we went out and bought that tube and tried installing it, but we didn't have a wrench that was big enough, so we had to hold off on it and we slept at the other elders' apartment that night so we'd have a place to shower in the morning. Sadly, the next day we weren't be able to fix the toilet either, because we had a conference in Brno for all the trainers and their greenies (greenie bootcamp) where we basically had a little talk with president about how we can do this job and also to discuss any problems that we may have with our greenies - communication, working, studies ATD... Also, we had missed our bus to Brno by about one minute, so we ended up being thirty minutes late rather than the forty-five minutes early that we had planned just because of the timing of the buses and other stuff, so we ended up stalling the conference for thirty minutes. Then at the end of conference, we missed our bus home too! So we ended up waiting for the next bus home, which was about two hours later. That was a pain, but it taught us a good lesson: don't be late. =\
Anyway, our toilet is fixed now and we're back in Olomouc so everything is in order and we're doing great! This week is going to be awesome, and we're really going to get Saša moving toward baptism. He's really cool and Elder Page likes him too because he speaks English.
I love you all and know the Lord blesses us when we do our best, even despite our little problems like exploding toilets.
Starší Monk