January 18 - Football and Exchanges

Hey family, this week was eventful to say the least. Unfortunately, Duty and I have a dinner appointment in about 50 minutes. It takes a half hour to get there so this might be a shorty. Umm where to begin, P-day last week i landed a standing backflip, be jealous, unfortunately i landed it on my back... so i won't be trying anymore of those. Bad idea from the start, but the promised food as a reward seemed like good incentive at the time. The sisters had exchanges for a week with the sisters from krakow. So we had sister mcgary here for the week and she was quite the entertainment, good to mix up the faces a little bit. Transfers coming up here in a couple weeks, im excited to get some new homies in here, itll be sad to see some of the elders go though. Anyways, i think it was tuesday night.. maybe wednesday, sister castleton asked me to give her a blessing. She found out during email the day before that her mom had been diagnosed with cancer. I was intimidated out of my mind especially when it is something as serious as that. Hope she received some comfort and maybe some answers from the Lord. The following night the elders in our district decided to do creative contacting on the rynek because we had about an hour left of proseleyting time and we were pretty much burnt out. So we took a football out to the rynek. We arent talking futbol, we're talking good old american football. I dunno if youve ever seen a Pole try to catch a football, i have to be honest its like.. well, probably just like me trying to dribble a soccer ball.. no, lie, its worse. I'm pretty sure they are all physically challenged, it'l almost sad. Anyways we were tossing it around to random people, talking to some people.. it was way cold out .probably around 2 celcius... then Burt, he's just this big thick guy.. points to this group of middle aged polish guys and puts up this hail mary. Yup.. the only one in the group of about 10 guys that wasn't looking gets absolutely dominated. And yeah.. the guy had to be wearing glasses. The ball hits him square in the face, his glasses fall to the rynek.. and madness insues. Punches were thrown, blood shed. No, he was way mad though, the police come over and kick us off the rynek. We felt pretty bad so me and duty went home and ordered telepizza to eat our sorrows away. On thursday, maybe friday, heck i dunno.. i went on an exchange. The zone leaders thought it would be a good idea to have district leaders go on exchanges so that they could see how other DL's run their districts. So they decided to exchange duty with the furthest DL away from us in the South, krakow. So i spent the next 6 hours of my day on a train to krakow while elder manookin came down to exchange with Duty. Pretty big waste of time and the missions money if you ask me but im not one to complain :-) I exchanged with his comp obviously elder Thomas. He's a, well, for lack of a better word, a different spirit of our Father. He's the group ahead of me so he's been in the country 2 months longer. Our exchange actually went really well though, he got a lot of people to stop just because of the uniqueness (sp?) of his voice inflection and accent, and just everything haha. I really can't even been to describe this kid you really just have to meet him. We taught a ton of lessons that day though, it was good to be with someone as young as him too because i got thrown into the fire a little bit as far as my polish goes. I speak and understand a little more than him so i got into this conversation with these two atheist guys. To be honest they are actually a lot easier to talk to than Catholics, pretty much anyone that doesnt have the iron fist of the catholic church over them is easier to talk to. Anyways we duked it out for a while, they still weren't convinced, but really we arent here to convince anyone just invite and teach. It's pure laziness on myopic-ness (sp) on their part if they dont want to find out for themselves. Unfortunately that's how most of Poland is. Anyways Thomas and i had a good time together, i also had a lot of fun with some of the other elders in Krakow. We whiteboarded together and i got to jam on guitar with some larrys. took some sweet pictures that i think ill just burn onto a cd and send home to you all, i apologize once again for the lack of pictures. So yeah krakow was fun i suppose, still seemed like a lot of trouble for just one day of exchanges. It took sister lindquist and i like 7 hours to get back to wroclaw though which was another adventure i dont have time to type. Umm yeah was happy to get back to Wroclaw, oh, the main reason i didnt want to go to krakow was because duty and i had a set up with krystyna our old bapt date that day. Duty said it went way well, she has a solid testimony that it is true. She quit her job so that she could come to church so duty and i were in high spirits. She promised to be at church yesterday, but yeah, she didn't show up so i dunno what the deal is. It is really hard to love the people of poland when they dont keep committments. I just want to be like "I'm still kind of touched by that whole 'my word is as strong as oak' statement" Poles are pretty bad about keep committments in promises, drives me batty sometimes. Still love them to death though, to death. Hope she gets baptized. That night all the of us elders went to shi crazy christian gathering. Guitars rocking out the whole bit, it's crazy to me that people think they can worship the God of heaven and earth through rocking out. Played some basketball with some hooli kids outside the back of our klatka the next day. 2 on 5, we owned on them pretty bad haha. then they put the ball on the ground and challenged us to soccer, we got ripped apart pretty bad. Have a great day, sorry for the rushed email. have a great week all

love, elder day

oh have fun in hawaii, big bullies :-) soak in some rays for me