Dear Family,
How is everyone doing? It's been a while since I've heard from a few of you. I'd just like to say that this week was a ton better! We had member lessons for the first time this transfer, we had progressing investigators, and we had people to church! I know for some people in some other missions, these aren't hard things, but here they are. Anyway, million times better.
One of the really cool experiences this week was with a guy named Saša (Sasha). A couple of weeks ago, probably three or four, I was looking through the phone and was calling some people up, and there were two really strange entries that were entered as "P F __(name)__." Usually an entry starting with "P" means potential, but "F" means former. A potential former? What's that? I was curious, so I called. I was surprised to hear a guy pick up, but even more surpised to hear the guy say that he was Saša. I could have sworn that Saša was going to be a girl. Wasn't, but he seemed really cool and agreed to meet with us sometime, but he didn't know his schedule. Then a few days later, I called again, and he said that he could be at our place at 3:35. I was really confused to hear that because that's strangely specific, but I said okay and that gave us about an hour. The guy came and he was really awesome. Turns out that he's not Czech, but he lives and works here. He's originally from Bulgaria. The guy is such a computer nerd, kind of like me. He works making servers and server space for the Internet. Anyway, it turns out that he speaks really good English too. So we spoke with him in English, talked a little about our message, about ourselves and about why he stopped meeting with the missionaries before, to which he said that he didn't know. That made me curious, so I went and looked in the area book and saw that he had a record for one lesson, and then a drop saying that he's never in contact and that he can never meet. Well, that definitely isn't the case anymore. Turns out that he had gone to Bulgaria for a half year and that's why he was out of contact. Obviously he had forgotten to tell the missionaries. I also found out from the record that he had been found in April of last year, so it's been quite a while. Also, the last time he met with the missionaries, he brought his friend Ondra and he also had a progress record, but also only one entry/lesson. So it's really cool to see that the Lord brings people to you sometimes.
So we met with Saša this last week after he had a little vacation of two weeks in Bulgaria, and he brought Ondra to his lesson again! I was actually going to ask him about his friend Ondra and if he had any interest. Seems that the Lord already knows. Our lesson went really well and we taught them a lot, but probably the best thing is that we taught the lesson and it didn't seem to decrease how much they saw us as their friends. After the lesson, we went right back to talking about computer games, if they have girlfriends or not (which neither of them do) and other such random things. I just love that I can be a missionary and also be a friend to these people. That may be one of the most rewarding things I've felt on my mission so far, but they also did miss church even though they had said that they'd come. Oh well, they'll come next week.
Just a fun little experience that we three had this last week is one day we came out to the town square because Elder Pearson needed to prepare for a meeting with the branch mission leader, and we didn't want to be stuck at the building doing nothing so we'd rather be contacting people on the náměstí. While we were there, no one would listen; there just weren't that many people because it was a Saturday. Really, weekends die here. Completely backward from America, it seems. Anyway, so we came back to the place where Elder Pearson was sitting on the sloup (monument to the Trinity - around the bottom you can sit on the base of it) and found that there were some old people sitting rediculously close to him. Oh well. So, we started talking to Elder Pearson - just talking for the sake of talking - and I kept noticing out of the side of my eye that the old lady that was sitting right next to Pearson was glancing at me and then at my tag over and over. I thought this a little peculiar, so I turned and said, "Dobrý den," and they looked really surprised. They started talking with me but I didn't really understand them. They kept talking and I could tell that they were trying to figure out what languages I knew. They asked me in German if I know German; they asked me in Italian if I know Italian; and they continued with a few other langauges which I can't remember off the top of my head, but they basically asked me about four or five different languages and then they seemed to give up and just spoke Polish with me. Wow... that fried my brain. I could understand better when I zoned out than when I concentrated on what they were saying. Anyway, we started conversing and more and more of them kept showing up. There were probably three at the beginning, but after a moment, there were probably around ten or eleven of them, all of them speaking to me in Polish. I'm here trying to speak Czech and there were a few of them that tried hard enough to understand my Czech and keep a conversation with me in Polish. So, they were asking all sorts of questions like who we were, and we told them that we were the Mormons and they immediately reacted to that in a really friendly manner and were saying things like, "Oh! It's the Mormons! You guys are everywhere!" and then there was laughing and more talking. They would ask me about where I was from, if I had a girlfriend, if I was a virgin (that one was kind of weird to get as a question from a bunch of old pepole), if I was allowed to get a girl from the Czech Republic, if I was here looking for a girl, why I looked so weird... the questions just seemed to go on and on, but I loved it because I hadn't had anyone so intrigued and excited to speak to me in a long time. Turns out that they were tourists, and that was pretty apparent. Then one of them said, "I want to get a picture of you," and all of a sudden all the others wanted to as well! Then they started to want to get pictures WITH us and so we were probably taking pictures for a good three or four minutes with a bunch of them going the entire time. That was just kind of nuts, but it goes to show me, once you know one of the Slavik languages, you can probably pick up the others pretty easily.
As you probably can't tell from the title, it says "It's already transfers? How so?" Yes, it is transfers already. I'm freaking out. I called Elder Kreitzer about an hour ago just to speak to him about it a little and he pointed out to me that at the end of this next transfer, I will have been out on the mission for an entire year. Isn't that crazy? I have no idea where the time has gone. Anyway, as I said in my last email, transfers aren't going to be as crazy as they have been in the past because they want us to stay in the same place as long as possible so we can get the most done. Anyway, this transfer, they're doing a lot of really cool things: they're changing the whole zone leader/district leader thing - doing away with that and changing it back to pure zone leaders and having a different companionship be district leader, they're reopening the Brno zone, and we're opening up two new areas! The new areas will be Pardubice, which is a new city that hasn't had missionaries for about two to three years and the other is another area in Ostrava, which can actually handle having more missionaries. Anyway, here's the news, I'm staying in Olomouc and Elder Page is leaving me! He's going up to Ostrava to be in one of the old areas. He's going to be follow-up trained by Elder Blair, who's really awesome. Elder Page is going to have an awesome time with him. As I said, I'm staying here in Olomouc and I'm going to be follow-up training Elder Pearson from Elder Page's group. Elder Pearson (the one that's already here in Olomouc) is feeling intruded upon and feels that he needs to declare his dominance as the older/better Pearson. This should be interesting having two "Elder Pearsons" in the same area. Also, I'm going to be the district leader here in Olomouc now that they're splitting up the responsibility.
Anyway, that's about it for this week. Some of the members here said they were going to kill someone if I got transfered out. I'm not quite sure what I did to get them to like me so much, but I guess I did something right. Lucky for them (and for that un-named "someone"), I'm staying. So you will all still be hearing about the news here from Olomouc for at least two more months.
Love you all and I'm working hard for you,
Starší Monk