Dear Family,
So, I feel that I must explain my "subject" line. Starší Price has told me a few times that I was "born at a bad time" meaning that Christmas and New Years is a strange time to come into the field. I must agree. Now that Christmas and New Years are over, the real mission work begins. Looking back, those few weeks were crazy (šylený).
So I got a few questions from some people and it seems that you really want to know what every-day life is like here. Let's see if I can explain correctly.
Well, first things first, we wake up at 6:30 every day and then we have morning prayer. I, and perhaps Starší Price too, doze on and off through the entire thing, so they end up being anywhere from five to fifteen minutes long. But once we're up from that we do our morning exercises (Spelling? Not quite sure - Czech has thrown off my spelling so badly because everything's phonetic. Gah!) which comprises of us doing pushups to see if we can outdo the other. He wins every day. The other day I thought I'd have him with 74, but he ended up doing 104. I'll face it, he has two years of doing pushups on me. After that we do the normal daily things to get ready - shower, brush our teeth, eat granola with yogurt for breakfast, atd...
Then we have our studies which takes three hours. Won't go into detail about those, because I'm sure that I'd just bore you. Then we go out for our work! Let me just explain a few of the things that we do and perhaps a few little experiences that I've had with each. Most of our time is spent either in lessons with people or out trying to find new people that we can teach. We've got about four or five investigators who are "progressing" right now (which means they have met with us more than once are keeping their commitments like reading from the Book of Mormon, and possibly have come to church at least once). We meet with them as much as possible, but sometimes we can only meet once or twice during the week.
Something strange that Starší Price and I have found out is that people tend to open up to us much faster than they would to other people. I have no idea why. We went yesterday to this one lady's home just to meet with her. Her name is Magdalena Boržutová and she is probably one of the sweetest ladies we've ever met. She's super super Catholic and doesn't seem like she's changing anytime soon, but we keep meeting with her because she loves the Liahona and she's still keeping all the commitments we give her. Anyway, yesterday we went there and (at this time it was about 15:00 -- another interesting thing, they go on military time here instead of doing am/pm) were sitting on her couch talking to her. Then she stops and asks us if we've eaten yet. Without hearing our response, she gets up and says, "I bet you haven't." Then she goes into the kitchen and makes us lunch. Now, you must understand that lunch here is the most important meal of the day. Not like it is in America. So lunch isn't just a sandwich or something, it was gulaš. The Czechs here love their sauces. We, as Americans, love spices and flavorings like that, but here they just cover, and I mean literally cover, everything in sauce. So she gave Starší Price Knedliky with Gulaš and I had pasta with Gulaš. It was awesome. Anyway, after that we went back into her living room and we spoke for a while longer. I was zoning in and out the entire time because it's hard to pay attention when you can only understand about one of every five to twenty words. Anyway, a few times she looked at me and asked if I wanted to take a nap and that I could if I wanted to. She said this jokingly, not because I was zoning out, but because she knows I can't understand much. We were there for probably about an hour and a half, when normal meetings should be about one hour max. When we left, she went to the window and watched us go all the way out to our car. What a sweet woman. When we got in the car, Starší Price told me that she had told us a story that she hadn't told anyone except for her sister. Why she opened up to us like that, I'm not sure. Perhaps there's something about us (missionaries) that people can just trust without knowing why. Dunno. Also, she told us about the other day when she was at the grocery store and there were some ladies talking about two men in big black coats going around bothering people. Sister Boržutová must have known they were talking about us and said to them, "those boys wouldn't hurt anyone" and stood up for us. Why isn't this woman Mormon? It continues to boggle me. She needs to be Mormon! She's perfect! She has some difficulty understanding the atonement and one or two other things but besides that, she's basically mormon already.
Now for the fun part of our days: finding people. Let me talk about yesterday because it's fresh in my mind. You get a huge variety of people that come to the door. So, yesterday we went tracting in one ponelok and did what we always do. We try and get into the building. Luckily the first person let us in and then we took the elevator up to the top. Then you start knocking on doors and work your way down through the floors. We went to the guy who let us in first, and luckily he was on the top floor. He opened the door and he seemed like a nice guy, probably about his young thirties and he was obviously living with his girlfriend because on the door it had his name and her name and they didn't have the same last name. Usually the doors will just say, "Bartošovi" or "Slovačkovi" or some other name. The -ovi ending means (name)'s plural referring the the father. Women, when they get married, get her husband's name with the -ova ending meaning (name)'s singular meaning that she is his. Little more intense than the American tradition that we have. Anyway, back to our door guy. He came to the door and we introduced ourselves as missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ and that we had a short movie to share with him, if he had just five minutes to meet with us. The movie however, is Searching for Happiness, which you can watch in English on the mormon.org website. The movie is brand new in Czech, meaning we got it in zone conference last Friday. This was our first attempt to use it. So he asked to see it, and we pulled it out and it's this sketchy looking DVD in a white paper case with nothing written on either. So, it's not much to look at and he saw it as such and said that he didn't have any interest. Škodá (pity). So he shut the door, and we went to the next door, but then we started hearing him and his girlfriend yelling at each other. It got pretty intense. Perhaps that's why he wasn't interested. Don't know how much good that movie would have done right then with them having bad feelings at the time. So we went to the next floor and the fight got bad enough that she said she was going "home." That could be her parents' home, because it looked like she lived with her boyfriend. Meh.
Later we went to another door, and I was up (Starší Price and I switch off every other door who's starting the conversation). So I knocked and an old guy came to the door. He didn't look too happy, but as soon as I said, "Dobrý Den. Já jsem Starší Monk a toto je moje společnik Starší Price. Jak se daři dnes?" (Hello. I am Elder Monk and this is my friend/comrade Elder Price. How are you today?) he seemed to brighten up a little, but replied, "Prosím? Nerozumím." (Excuse me? I don't understand.) Starší Price told me that I just needed to speak up and slower for old people. So I tried again, but when I said that we were missionaries, he changed to a little bit of a frown and said that he wasn't interested. Then we started doing the other doors on his floor, and he opened his door and told us that none of them were home and that we should go to the next floor. So obviously he was watching us from his peep hole. Funny old guy.
Anyway, my time is nearly up. I have other things that I must do today. Perhaps I'll talk some more about what we do here in the Czech Republic next time.
Love you all and I hope you're doing well,
Starší Monk