The Mission Begins!

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

Christmas and New Year! (Vanocé a Silvestr)

Dear Family,

To explain why I didn't write last week, I need to explain a few little things. Well, these "little things" will probably not be so little. Tak (so)... Here in the Czech Republic, Christmas/Vanocé is three days long. The first day is the traditional "Christmas" as we know it, on which Ježíšek (baby Jesus) comes to give the presents instead of Santa Claus. And it happens during the day, so the parents have to be extra witty on how to get the presents under the tree without the kids seeing them. Whenever Ježíšek comes, he rings his bell and the kids come running, but when they get there, Ježíšek is gone! They say that Ježíšek is invisible, and usually comes when the family is eating dinner. In that case, the dad (or the mom - either one) sneaks off and puts the presents under the tree, and then rings the bell. Quickly the kids run in and the parents says, "Awww man! You just missed him!" Fun stuff. So this day is the 24th of December. Then the next two days basically consist of the family just staying together to have good bonding time. I felt really bad for the people who had to work the trams and the trains on those days. We used them a few times on those days, and they did not seem like the happiest people in the world.

So, Vanocé is from the 24th to the 26th here, and if you remember, the 26th was a Saturday, so President Slovaček made our P-day for the week that Saturday so that we wouldn't waste anymore time not being able to do work. So the next Monday was a normal working day instead of P-day. However, since Saturday was still a holiday for the Czechs, I couldn't write an email because the email cafe that we normally use was closed! So was the Library! So, this has been a very long week. My companion, Starší Price keeps telling me, "You had such a terrible birth (coming to the mission field). These few weeks are not normal." However, he also said that we did much better these couple of weeks than he did last year in Brno. There, he said, nothing was happening. They would walk around the ghost town and the few people who were out didn't want to talk. Their current investigators had gone home or didn't want to talk either. So, I'm ready for some normal weeks and see how normal missionary work goes. :D

So, a few realy cool experiences that we had. This week has been a week of a few firsts: I went tracting (knocking on people's doors), I rang my first doorbell to try and get into a building. Here in the Czech Republic, basically everyone lives in things called Poneloks which are basically really quickly-erected communist housing and are made of solid concrete. Fun huh? So it's like an apartment building, except not as nice. Some of them are pretty cozy/big, but others literally have one bedroom/living room, a kitchen, and a very small bathroom. When I say this bedroom, it's probably 10x12. That is tiny for a few couches to sleep on AND all of your stuff. It's nuts. So you have to have someone let you into the building, and you do that by ringing someone and asking them to let you in basically. That was an adventure. So, those were both really fun. Right after last time I spoke to you, Starší Price and I went grocery shopping! It was really fun seeing things that I recognized, but didn't know what it was. Like tomato pureé, but thinking it's tomato sauce because I can't read the box. Yes, it comes in boxes. So does the milk in fact. The milk is really cool... you can leave it on your shelf and then cut it open and drink it, and it's fine! But then after it's opened you have to refridgerate it. We got a loaf of bread and that was pretty cool. It wasn't anywhere near as good as the bread that we made at the bakery, but then again, this bread was well under one seventh of the price. Yes, a very large loaf of real bread costed only 15Kč (by the way, right now it's 18Kč to the dollar). So all-in-all, we checked out and it run up to 1010Kč and that's about 50-60 dollars.

One thing that I'm doing every Tuesday (Úterý) is teach English (Angličtina)! I teach the advanced class, so I speak English the entire time. However, it's hard to teach for an hour about something, when you don't know what you're teaching. This last time I taught about description and how it's important. Then we had an activity where I wrote a simple noun at the top of a page and wrote five words they couldn't use to describe it and then they had to write out a description, so that the other people in the class can guess what it is. That was fun. Basically like Taboo, except no time limit. They did really well with it, and then we played twenty questions because that's all about description too.

We have a few investigators that I'd like to talk about for a second. One's named Tomaš. Tomaš is a very smart guy, but likes to have five year plans for everything. So he has one for us/the church. He's a little afraid right now to join the church because he believes very strongly that if you surround yourself with a kind of people, you'll become like them, and what he's seen of the people in the branch here, is that they don't have any dreams. They have lots of faith, but no vision, no dreams, nothing that they're reaching for. Tomaš is very goal oriented. He's 18 years old, but he's already doing business consulting as a job. Yesterday he sat us down and explained it all to us. To be truthful, it doesn't interest me very much, but he knows what he's talking about and he seems to have a really good grip on it. Also, he speaks very good English. You'd know that he's a foreigner and that he doesn't know all the words to explain himself, but his English is better than my Czech! We meet with Tomaš about every other day or every three days, and we're really trying to get a good connection with him so that he knows that we care about him. I think that it's starting to work, because the other day in one of our meetings, he asked why we care about him so much. I think that was a break-through with him, because he can see that we do care about him. We explained that we love him because we love God, and God wants us to love Him back and to do that we love and serve everyone else. We then gave him 1 Nephi 8:11 and told him to watch for what Lehi does when he eats the fruit. We also had him read it because it's amazing. Anyway, that's Tomaš for you. He's making progress, but he's still doubtful.

Then there's Denisa. Denisa's awesome. 'Nough said. The last elders found her right at the end of the transfer while they were on splits and taught her at her doorstep. That was the only contact that they had with her. Then we took over and we have only taught her four times, but we already have a baptisimal date! She's sooooo golden. Two lessons ago, we started about the second lesson, and I can explain about the first half of it in Czech, so my companion had me do so. Then he said, "Can you list the frst principles and ordinances for Denisa?" (In Czech of course, but somehow I understood.) I pushed through those with difficulty. Then he went off about something and everything and I was very lost. I caught words here and there, but they were very random to me. Basically, afterward, Starší Price told me that he had basically taught her everything except for the law of tithing. He taught her the Word of Wisdom, the Law of Chastity, and "atd" (Czech equivelant for "etc" - means "a tak dalé" which means "and so further"). Denisa is so awesome, because she said that she already does those things! She only drinks fruit tea (Ovocné čaj), she doesn't smoke, she doesn't drink, she lives the law of chastity... how else could she be any better? I'll tell you one thing: she doesn't come to church, but that's our fault. We hadn't told her about it. So in that same meeting we told her that it was a commandment to come to church, to which she replied in Czech, "So that's why I went to the Kostel (Cathedral / big catholic meeting house) every Sunday when I was little." So we invited her to church and she accepted without hesitation. Yesterday, we were shocked to find that she wasn't there! We called her after church to see what was wrong, and she had thought it was in the evening. Guess we won't make the mistake of not telling them "rano" (morning) again. Anyway, she's got a baptismal date for the 6th of February. Sweet!

Hmm, what else. Oh, for new year, which they call Silvestr (which I will explain in a second), we had to be back in our apartments at 6:00 pm. The reason for that is because when you combine drunk people and fireworks, you get the Czech New Year. Basically, in some places they'll have things called Ponelok wars, in which they fire fireworks at eachother's buildings. Safe huh? Yeah, as I said - Drunkards + Fireworks =/= safe.

So about calling New Year "Silvestr," here in the Czech Republic, and maybe in all of Europe (I'm not sure), they have things called name days. Basically, whatever day your name is associated with, you get to celebrate on that day as your "name day." Some people think that it's bigger than your birthday. So, on the new year, all the people with the name Silvestr partied even harder. I was with some investigators and they figured that my name day was "Ondřej" (or the Czech equivelant for Andrew). However, people here in the Czech Republic don't have middle names, and when I told them that I do, one of the boys was jokingly frustrated with me because I have two name days. Anyway, I can't remember which days they are. I want to say that "Ondřej" is in November or September somewhere.

Anyway, I need to go. This is a sufficiently long letter for you all to chew on for the next week. :D

Have fun, and I love you all. Hope you all had a Vaselé Vanoce a Nový Rok (Happy Christmas and New Year).

Lots of Love,
Starší Monk

First Week in the Czech Republic

Dear Family,

Well, I'm finally here in the Czech Republic. I got to call my family before I got on the plane that headed for Austria. That was fun but I couldn't really find much to say. However, we talked for a good little while. So, we got to the Mission home in Prague at about noon on Tuesday (Uterý) and had lunch with the mission president. Then we had pictures taken and then Sister Slovaček sent the photos to my dad, so maybe he put them on the blog. I'm not sure. Anyway, the president's assistants took us out for a "Prague Walk" and we went to see the city. Sad thing was, I had already seen most of the things they took me to see from my Europe tour two summers ago. But it was still way awesome to see everything when there weren't any tourists! Yay! Anyway, we did that walk and that took quite a while. At about five o'clock, we went out and did contacting for our first time. That was super intense. They basically gave us a phrase or two that we could use to try and talk to people. They gave us "Prosím Vás" (literally: I ask to you/meaning: excuse me) and "Proč máme vanoce?" (Why do we have Christmas?). Anyway, we were out with Elder Williams and Elder Mittanck. Mittanck was with me and Elder Jones and Elder Horváth went with Elder Williams. The entire time I don't think that Elder Mittanck could stop a single person long enough to talk to them. Seemed like only Elder Jones and I could stop them. One guy that I stopped gave us his number so that we could contact him! AWESOME! He said that his family was Catholic so the idea of God wasn't new to him, but he didn't really seem to believe in Catholicism. He seemed pretty interested in what we had to say. Anyway, then we went to this little cafe thing and had dinner. I had Svičkova which was really interesting. Most missionaries are like, "Oh, I love Svičkova" and I didn't really see what was so special about it. Yes, it was good, but why the big deal? Anyway, it was good. Don't get me wrong. Then we went "home." President let us go to bed at seven, when the missionary bedtime is ten thirty!

Then the next morning President woke us up at seven thirty, so we basically slept twelve hours. That morning we had orientational things with the AP's and the president and then we had lunch. We were told that we were going to get our new companions after lunch, so I was anxiously awaiting lunch. At lunch, they had the three greenies line up with the three trainers opposite us. Then President called up Elder Nowland and said where he was and gave a small overview about the area, and then said that Elder Horváth was going to be with him in České Budějovícé. Then he pulled the other two trainers up and talked about each of their areas. Elder Jones was called with Elder McLaughlin and I was called with Elder Price. Elder Jones is going to Ostrava and I'm in Zlín!

It's awesome here. I asked Elder Price how we were going to get back to Zlín, and he told I'll be spoiled because we get a car. Yeah, we have a car. It's a funny little thing called a Škoda Fabia and it's red. Fun little thing. Anyway, he then told me because we're losing ten missionaries and only getting three this transfer, we lost a companionship in Zlín so I get a phone too. Crazy. Also, since we lost a companionship, there are two apartments in Zlín, so we took the larger of the two and it's way nice, except that it looks like it hasn't been cleaned since the church was founded. So we spent most of today cleaning the thing.

The people here are awesome. They have a little bit of a wall around them because they lived through communism and stuff, but once you break through that wall, they're probably the nicest people I've ever met. Yesterday we went to a town called Kroměřiž to give an inactive lady a blessing. She's going in for cancer treatment tomorrow, but we went in and we spoke for a long time, and she was so increadibly nice. At the end of our visit, she gave us each a big box of chocolates. She's so sweet. Also, it looked like she painted her own eggs. Ya know the kinds of eggs that are really stereotypical for Russians where the egg is brown and then it has the brown and white patterns all over it of ropes and flowers and stuff? Yeah. She did those and they were amazing. I only saw a few when we were talking with her, but when we got up to go out the door, I saw that there were boxes and baskets full of these eggs. She's awesome. That's just one example of the people here. They're all so increadibly nice. I love them all to death.

I think that I'm going to get myself into trouble as far as the language goes, because I think my accent is better than my speaking abilities, and far better than my comprehension, because I always say "Dobrý Den" to the members or any other people and they think that I speak better than I do. Then they go off talking a million kilometers a minute and I can't understand anything. It's frightening. So, either I need to dumb down my accent, or really work on the language. I can pick out about one or two words out of every sentence, but sometimes I hear a word and I analyze it and then they're already two sentences down the road. Gah! This language is going to take some getting used to. My speaking is already much better than when I left the MTC just a short week ago. I cannot believe it. It's truly amazing.

As for my companion, we're getting along very very well. He's awesome and I can see why President wanted to get to know us, the greenies, before he assigned us to a trainer. He wanted to find someone who would really match us. Elder Price is in his last transfer and will be going home in a few months. So, in missionary terms, he's my dad (because he's "raising" me), Zlín is where I will be growing up, and I will be killing Elder Price (because I'm his last companion). :)

Anyway, I can now use something other than myldsmail.net for email, and I have more than thirty minutes. Right now I'm at forty-two minutes, and it's going to cost me 28 Kč which is about 2 USD. I have a new email, so if you don't want to pay one dollar to send one piece of (physical) mail to me in the Czech Republic, which would probably take about a week to a week and a half to get here, then you can write me at either monka90@myldsmail.net or at czech.monk90@gmail.com. Either one is good.

Woah, first couple days gone - Crazy!
Love you all,
Starší Monk

Andy's First Area

Elder Price and Elder Monk (in Zlín)

We're hoping this picture wasn't taken in the
missionary apartment. If so, there seems
to be a Word of Wisdom issue...

Prague Arrival pictures

Sister Slovacek, Elder Monk
and President Slovacek

Elder Price and Elder Monk

Elder Horvath, Elder Monk and Elder Jones