"First Door Knocked"

7, January 2008 - 'First Door Knocked.. and Larrys" Its an absolutely beautiful day here in Wroclaw. Not a cloud in the sky and probably 30's or 40's. By far the best day we've had in a while. This week has been .. a week i cant tell you that right now. First full week of straight up missionary work and missionary life. I love my trainer Elder Duty.. he's a good man and a hard worker.. and more importantly he can speak Polish. He's from Georgia and yeah he is just an all-aroundstallion. I definitely got lucky. He's been out here a while though haha i bring up movies and music that i think are commonplace between us and he's all like... nope never heard of it. It'll be a trip when i get to that point. But we've have had an interesting week together. Our area is the majority of downtown Wroclaw .. the rynek and what not so we hav a great contacting area. Basically most of our time is spent roaming the rynek .. and saying a quick "przepraszam na chwile.." and they either keep walking like we dont exist, tell us they dont have time (90 percent of the time), or they stopand let us get to "we are missionaries.." then walk away. Some listen to us for a while and we get to teach them a little about our church. But they are definitely not a very receptive people. I had the opportunity to teach some way cool people on the streets though and some of them are justway incredibly nice. It was unreasonably cold this week which seems to be a recurring theme...it snowed a bunch the past couple days which made contacting hard.Elder Duty and i were having a tough time stopping people in the street because if you stop for more than 30 seconds your feet straight up freeze to the sidewalk... so a little frosbitten and down.. we took to the aparment buildings to knock doors. They call them Klatka's in Poland. They are all locked(obviously) so we have so buzz to each room until someone lets us in.. i thought it was way cool.. just like seinfeld... real live apartment building. Duty buzzed the first 20 or some rooms with little luck. I told him to do it just like they do in Seinfeld and just act like we know the person.. Don't even tell them we are missionaries.. just give them a little "hey sup." He told me i was crazy and dishonest.. i was neither.. i was just cold. So he tries it on the next one.. sureenough we get buzzed in :-) ... ill be sure to be more honest next time. So duty knocks the first few doors and shows me how its done. Noone was interested so i give my first door a shot. This old babcia (grandma) comes to the door and at first she seems way nice.. although her husband was yelling from the other room for her to shut the door. We started telling her about the church and she starts touching are tags.. like alot.. which should have been a hint to get out of dodge. After smelling the alcohol on her breath we could tell she was a little drunk. And apparently she had mistaken us for Catholic boys who supposedly come around and sing kalendas (carols).. so she kept asking us to sing. Yeah she was pretty crazy and she had this weird creepy voice.. she reminded me of one of those psychic ... palm reader ladies. So her husband keeps yelling and i look over at duty like "lets get the heck out of here" but he keeps trying to teach/talk to her. All of the suddent the husband comes to the door, pantless and starts saying some not so nice things. Duty was defending us then the guy comes straight out and grabs Elder Duty and pushes him back.. this confrontation continues for another half minute until Duty just starts walking away. And all the time this is happening the crazy babcia is telling me how i need to marry her beautiful granddaughter in the states. Haha it was quite the experience.So first door was a goodie. I was a little shaken up after the whole thing, Duty as well.. we decided maybe we should stick to contacting. The next day we actually went tracting again and got let in to someones apartment! they were a way cool family that had investigated the church 3 years ago. I had my firstexperience with fruit tea.. which is awful. But it was still an amazing thing to get let in. Duty told me that he hadnt got let in while tracting in several months. Probably the most success we have is when we go whiteboarding. We go with another companionship and set up the whiteboard on the rynek and write a question up like... "who do you admire" or "who is your hero" etc... and then we have them write it down and somehow try to tie it into the gospel. Some of the Poles get pretty into it and its fun to be with other missionaries. Its funny for the "who is your hero question" i think 8 out of 10 poles told me Chuck Norris! Haha i dunno how they know him.. but chuck norris is a pretty big deal over here.. strange culture. Duty and i have a few investigators. Although we had 3 set ups this week and all 3 people flaked out. happens i guess, i was way sad i didnt get to teach though. We have some investigators with bapt. dates but we havent been able to get a hold of them yet. Its sad how many people lose contact with the missionaries after there is a transfer and new ones come in. I had some pretty funny run-ins with some "larrys" this week. the elders in the mission call the homeless/drunkard polish guys 'larrys' why, im not sure. But they stop me and duty all the time and try to get money out of us. we usually play dumb and tell them in english that we dont speak polish. Elder duty had one attack him this week... hes doing ok though.. larrys dont fare too well when they are under the influence. Sunday was awesome here.. the branch is incredible. We had a lot more members and investigators there yesterday. They have such amazing testimonies of this work. Some of the elders in our group have a 20 year old investigator named Monika. And she is being kicked out of her home because she is getting baptized. It is pretty incredbile to think the amount of faith she must have. I think of myself and whether or not i could honestly let my family disown me if i believed in this gospel. It would take one heck of a testimony.. i definitely admire her conviction and faith. I love the people here. And ive already started to develop a hate of the cathloic church. Which might not be the best thing, but it just controls their thoughts and ideals too much. What a different place this world would be if founded upon the principles of the gospel. Well i love you all, have an absolultely amazing week. School starting and what not. Hopefully alysia gets to London ok :-) thanks for your emails.. they make my life. Definitely use the email to send letters i can receive and send to only my immediate family. But dont go through the trouble of mailing anything, email works great. Unless you want to send me davage packages, always welcome :-) the cereal here is kind of second rate..cough..cough :-) i might be using my debit card a little this week because i got 700 zlots at the start of the month.. but i had to buy a ton of stuff and pay 400 zlots for my visa work so that im legal.. i get refunded for it but it wont be for a while.. so im poor right now. i think thats about it! wszystkiego najlepszego -starszy daly