February 26

Përshëndetje familje!

Another good week here in Shkodër.

The cold weather in Utah seems to have made it here to Albania. It's been snowing non stop these past two days. Everyone has been super excited because it doesn't snow here very often, but it has been super cold too. And just when things were starting to warm up, well what do you do. 

I'm doing better with the language. There are still a few people that have a super thick accent that I still have a little difficulty understanding, our investigator Rita for example, but in general I'm back into the loop.

Our area is doing pretty well. We've tried to meet with a ton of new people this week, but no one shows up for the lessons we set. But we were able to meet all three of our main investigators this week. 

Our most progressing investigator for the moment is Rita. She's super cool, and is pretty catholic. We've met her a few times now, and she comes pretty much any time that we give her a call. She's reading the Book of Mormon and praying and seems to understand what we teach too. She came to church on Sunday and said that she really liked it. She might still think we're catholic, but hopefully church helped her understand that we aren't.

We're also teaching the Jakaj family. They live in Laç which is about 30-40 minutes past Lezhë and they have a son who is a missionary right now serving here in Albania. The daughter in the family is also baptized so now we're trying to work with the parents. The dad is on a baptismal date, but is pretty shaky on whether or not he'll make it. We were able to get him a Book of Mormon printed in larger print this week, because he can't read the Book of Mormon in normal print, and that should really help him progress.

Then our other main investigator for now is Leka. He drives a van that takes people from city to city and is a super nice guy. He's really busy so we haven't really been able to meet with him a lot recently, but he will be driving all of us to stake conference next week and we'll do our best to get him to come in and listen to the meeting.

On another note, we had zone conference this week. It was awesome, the trainings were mostly focused on the Book of Mormon and the family. So that's what we'll focus on in our work. We're trying to find families and help everyone who comes to stay by being converted through the Book of Mormon. Great things are on the way here.

The members here are awesome! There aren't a lot, we only average like 15 or so people in church every week, but they're super strong. All of them work really well together and really want to go to the temple. They all do their best to fulfill their callings and to serve and teach each other. It's an awesome place here.

All in all, it's really cold here, but it's great. I'm doing great, still having an awesome time.

I love you all!

Have a great week!

Elder Gardiner