English Class: 10/27/14

Hej!

     This week has been pretty good. Last week on P-day we did some shopping, and I found a couple of pretty cool sweaters at a second hand store. This week it started out pretty cold, and almost snowed a couple times. Last Monday morning there was a little snow in the morning, but it didn´t stick. Then the rest of the week it was pretty rainy, but it got all the way up to about 10 degrees celsius.

     Last week me and Elder Stafford contacted a woman on the street who was not interested in the gospel, but is an English teacher at the high school and invited us to come and do a presentation on America for her class. She said some missionaries in the past did some presentations there and they really liked it. So on Wednesday we came and did a slide show presentation about America. We talked about Oregon, Idaho, American high school, differences between Sweden and the US, and gun laws, because their class has been talking about gun laws a lot. It was pretty fun. Elder Stafford used a lot of jokes. I talked about Portland, and had a slide about Nike´s world headquarters, and also about the phrase/bumper stickers that say "Keep Portland Weird". I found a pretty good picture to put on the slide show. It was a building with Keep Portland Weird painted on the side, but in front of the building there was a man on a unicycle, in a kilt, with a darth vader helmet and cape, playing bagpipes with flames shooting out of it. I thought it was a pretty good representation of Portland´s weird people, haha. Elder Stafford talked about Idaho, so he did a slide about potatoes, and another about Napoleon Dynamite. We thought nobody would know what Napoleon Dynamite is, but some of the guys in the class had actually just watched if for the first time last week. It was pretty crazy. 

     So the English teacher invited us back to teach all her other classes, and the other English teachers know about us now too. Even though we aren´t allowed to share the gospel directly in our presentations, they are good to help people see that we are just normal people, and not too weird haha. 

     This week we taught a guy from Afghanistan who had a pretty crazy story. He said that he spent 20,000 dollars on his engagement party, because apparently that is the custom in Afghanistan. He bought his fiance 10,000 dollars of gold. And he said the actual wedding will cost about 40,000 dollars. And he isn´t a super, super rich guy, so it is a ton of money. He is also training right now to hopefully be a pro soccer player. 

     Something else a little crazy that happened this week was that I let Elder Stafford cut my hair. He gave me a "swedish haircut", which basically means short on the sides, longer on the top. It actually turned out okay. I think it looks a lot better now that it´s had a few days to grow in a bit. Also, this week me and Elder Stafford discovered a hair dryer in our apartment. It´s actually pretty nice to use in the morning, haha. We also found a straightener and curler, but we are giving those to the sisters. 

     Tomorrow will be a pretty crazy day. We have zone conference in Stockholm, so we have a train that leaves here at 5am. So that means we will be waking up at 3:30, and we will be getting back at around 10 at night. It will be a long day. 

Elder Smith

Pictures!:

1) A selfie from working on a chimney a few weeks ago

2) Selfie of our district. Elder Bliss is the one in the hood, Elder Gray is in the back, Elder Stafford is in front, Sister Smith is kind of in the middle, and Sister Jacobs is in front of Sister Smith. 

3) Selfie on the bus. The gloved hand is actually Elder Stafford, but it looks like it´s my hand

4) I saw this out the window while eating breakfast yesterday, so I took a picture

5) Me and Elder Gray were texting awkward pictures to each other last night during dinner at the church with a member family. This is the only one I have of my new haircut. My hair is also conditioned (Elder Stafford is letting me use his conditioner) and styled using a hair dryer.

New Greenies- 10/20/14

Hej!

     This week we got three new missionaries in our area, and two of them are just out of the MTC! It is kind of weird to suddenly have other missionaries who are also just learning Swedish. So far all of the new missionaries seem nice and cool. Sister Smith has been out a little over a year, and will be going home the same time as Elder Stafford. 

     Last P-day wasn´t too exciting, but it was good. Me and the other elders played a game called Settlers of Catan, which is a board game that one of the elders had. So we had a kind of lazy day, which was nice. 

     This week we had zone training, so on Thursday we took the train up to Umeå. I felt kind of bad for the other missionaries though, especially the greenies. They had a super long day of traveling from the US, then a train ride from Stockholm to our area, then at 6 am the next day they took another train. Plus we took the train home that same night. So they did a ton of traveling in about 4 days in a row. 

     Zone training went well. Afterwards we all went to a pizza place to get kebab pizza. It´s a pizza that they have in Sweden that is some kind of meat called kebab, no one is sure if it´s a kind of beef or goat meat. Apparently it is the same as schwarma, if anyone has heard of that. But it is famous among missionaries. And everyone says that Norrland doesn´t have any good kebab pizza, but the place we went to was one of the exceptions. So now I am kebaptized, haha. 

     On Fridays we have an activity that investigators, less actives, or just people from the branch can come to. It is good for inviting investigators to so that they can just have fun and get to know some members. This week we played a game where you put flour in a bowl and turn it upside down on a plate, then take off the bowl, so it make a dome-shaped pile of flour. Then you put a coin on top. Then you take turns cutting a slice of flour away. You cut as close as you can to the coin without letting the flour beneath it collapse. Whoever makes the cut that makes it fall has to pick the coin out of the flour using only their mouth. So it was pretty fun. One time we got very, very close to the coin on all the cuts, so it was like a tower of flour. Everyone got very nervous at that point, haha. I will email some pictures of it if I have them. 

     I have a funny story to tell from this week. We invited an investigator to come see the church on Friday afternoon so we could give him a tour and explain how church works. So he came, and we showed him around, and we showed him the baptismal font then sat in the chapel to answer any questions he might have. He wanted to know what the font was for, so Elder Stafford found a picture of a baptism and showed him. Then our investigator got very quiet and thoughtful for a couple minutes, and kept saying "jag vet inte". Then he finally said what he was thinking. I was hoping maybe he was feeling the spirit, but actually he thought we wanted him to get baptized right then and there, so he was freaking out a bit. So we did our best to let him know that wasn´t what we were doing, and that baptism is something that is completely up to him, and is something that we would teach him about before he had to choose. He took it pretty well. He accepted a Book of Mormon in Arabic I think, then said he would need a little time to study it and figure out if he was interested, then he went home. So I guess I need to work on explaining stuff a little clearer.

     This week I was able to read the talks from Sunday Afternoon session of general conference, since it was too late at night here to watch it live. There were a lot of talks that I really liked. I really liked Elder Bednar´s talk where he talked about he and his wife watching their son to try to help his brother whose arm was hurt. It was a fun talk, but is also very true. Sharing the gospel doesn´t have to be anything big or official. It is easy if you think about how it is just helping a friend to have what we have. I feel very blessed to be a member of the church, and it is great to see how it can help other people´s lives as well.

     I hope everyone has a great week!

Elder Smith

Pictures: 

1) Contacting with Elder Ogaard before he left to his new area

2) Finding people to contact with Elder Ogaard

3) Contacting with Elder Stafford

4) We found this view behind an apartment building in Sodom. I think it´s some sort of bay that leads to the sea/ocean

5) We couldn´t find a Sodom sign, so this is the next best thing

6) Activity night with the flour game

Lots of Rain! 10/13/14

Hej!

     This week it rained pretty much every day. It is also pretty windy, so the rain goes a little sideways. It made having an umbrella interesting if it accidentally got caught in the wind and went inside out. But it was a fun week. 

     Last P-day I bought a good winter coat. It has fur in the hood, so it looks kind of funny, but luckily it is removable for times when I want to look a little more serious, haha. Also last P-day we played basketball with a 19 year old from the branch. We were playing outside when it was like 5 degrees, haha. 

     On Wednesday we got a call from the zone leaders telling us to move from our apartment into the sisters´ and a senior missionary couples´ old apartments. So we and the other elders moved out Thursday morning. I have a bit too much stuff, since I´ve bought a couple coats since coming here. But I managed to get it all there. Our new apartment is super nice. It smells good since sisters used to live there, it´s clean, it has a dishwasher, and there are heated tile floors in the entryway, kitchen, and bathroom. It´s pretty awesome. And also I´ve noticed it is a lot easier to focus when there is only the two of us in the apartment rather than 4. But the other elders live in the same building as us, so we still see them a lot.

     Transfers are this week. One of the elders here is being transferred, but the other one will be training! And we also found out that one of the new sisters coming here will also be a greenie! So now half of our district will be greenies. I´m super excited for it. This means I won´t be the newest missionary in the district anymore! I´m excited to tell the new missionaries some of the things I´ve learned and see how their Swedish is. We are thinking about doing greenie splits sometime, which would be fun but not too effective I think. Also, we found out that the sister coming here that is training is named Sister Smith. So I am expecting a lot of jokes from the members in our branch about that, haha. But I was talking to a member yesterday at church and apparently there have been a lot of times where an elder and sister have had the same or very similar last names here. So it will be interesting.

     Right now we pretty much just have one investigator who is really progressing. He is the one with a baptismal date. He quit snus and coffee last week, and hasn´t used them since. But he has been having a lot of trouble sleeping, and went to the doctor on Friday about it. We haven´t heard from him since then, so we are getting kind of worried. Hopefully everything is okay.

     In the second half of this week we had almost every appointment get cancelled. But we just went tracting (since it is hard to contact when it´s raining), so it was okay. This week we went tracting in Sodom. It is an actual town here, haha. Me and Elder Stafford tried to find a sign so we could take a picture in front of it, but we couldn´t find one. 

     I have been working a bit on my cooking skills this week. I made grilled cheeses one day, and a few nights ago I made pancakes for dinner, which was fun. We couldn´t find any actual pancake mix at the store, so we just used waffle mix. I think it´s pretty much the same thing. It worked out pretty well in my opinion. 

     I hope everyone has a great week!!

Elder Smith

Pictures:

1) Leaving the apartment in the morning

2) All of the non-Swedish names in Sodom

3) An extra pancake that we stuck on the wall above our door right before the other elders came in. We hoped it would fall on them. It missed, but they definitely weren´t expecting it to happen.

4) All wintered up

5) Brokyrkan. Kyrkan means "the church" in Swedish, so in Swenglish, it could be "the bro church". So we took pictures. We found it while searching for a sign that said Sodom on it. (It actually means "the bridge church")

6) We took off our shoes at this one guy´s house, and he gave us flip flops to wear inside. They looked funny with socks, so we took a picture.

Conference Weekend 10/6/14

Hej!

     This week has been kind of crazy, but also really fun. Last Monday we went winter clothes shopping. I couldn´t decide on a winter coat yet, but I got some scarves and a hat and a shirt from H&M, which is a Swedish company. When me and the other elders got home, we put on some of our new stuff and realized we looked like hipsters, so we took some pictures, haha. I also got this super warm, but cheesy looking sweater from a second hand store. That night me and Elder Stafford taught one of our investigators, and he wants to be baptized! He will be baptized on January 3rd, but we are hoping he will be willing to move it up, since he is almost ready right now. He had to quit coffee and snus (snus is like chewing tobacco but comes in packets and is more addictive I think).  So we have been working with him on that. We made a plan with him and asked him to get down to just a little a day by Friday, but he just went and threw out the last of his snus and has been going cold turkey the last 5 days! He is awesome. 

     Also this week we taught one of our investigators who is from Uritria, which is in Africa I think. She is Christian and has always been saying how the things we tell her are exactly what her church believes, so we went into this lesson with the goal of helping her see this church is the only true church, and help her see it´s different. So we watched the Restoration video with her, which basically goes over Joseph Smith´s first vision and a little about the early church. So afterwards our investigator was confused about how only two personages appeared to Joseph Smith, so we got into a discussion about the trinity, which led to how the Bible is imperfect. She showed us a verse to prove the trinity, and we noticed there was a Joseph Smith Translation there, so we were just like "actually, we believe that part is translated wrong". She was very surprised. She knew the bible wasn´t 100% translated right, but she said this verse had to be right. It was a strange lesson. We are glad she sees that her church is not exactly the same, but it is sad that it happened that way. So hopefully she will want to keep meeting with us and read the Book of Mormon. 

     This week I did some more roof work! First a man in the ward needed help working on the chimney of a house he´s fixing up. We had been at open church, so we were in church clothes. So he gave us some work jumpsuits and hats and shoes to wear over our church clothes. It was kind of funny, so we took pictures. Then on Saturday we helped finish part of a roof we worked on a couple weeks ago. But we were just helping lift up metal sheeting to go on the roof, so it wasn´t too hard or anything. 

     This week was general conference! We watched the Saturday Morning session at 6 o´clock at night, which was a little weird. Me and two of the other elders went out to a candy store earlier where you can shovel candy into a bag and you pay based on the weight of the bag. It was cheaper to get 2 kilos than to get just under 2 kilos, so we each had a 2 kilo bag of candy. I´m not sure how many pounds that it, but it´s at least 4, haha. So we had lots of godis (Swedish word for candy) for conference. Sunday morning we watched Priesthood session at 11, Saturday Afternoon at 2, and Sunday Morning at 6. We have to wait to watch Sunday Afternoon when it is online and when we have time. Luckily I got to watch almost all of conference in English. We had a little TV in the cultural hall for english speakers. One of our investigators came for Priesthood session, but his taxi was late so I watched the first part of Saturday afternoon with him in Swedish. I fell asleep during the second talk, haha. My swedish still has a ways to go. 

     One of my favorite talks was in Saturday Morning session, about knowing which way we face. We need to maintain the standards set by God, and not try to change them just because they go against what man thinks standards should be. The world today tries to tell us that we are wrong because we do not have the same morals and views as them, but that is not right. We can know that we are always right when we are looking towards God instead of the world.

I hope everyone has a great week!

Elder Smith

Pictures:

1) I think I look weird here but I have to show the sweater. Also, I got that infinity scarf(I think that´s what they´re called), but it is too short to wrap around twice and too long to be warm wrapped around once. So now it is just for show, haha.

2) Funny clothes funny faces

3) The leaves are yellow!

4) hipster clothes funny faces

5) Me on the roof with funny clothes

Almost a Month! 9/29/14

Hej!

      I have been in Sweden for almost a month! It feels really weird to think about it. The weeks go by really quick here. I had my first week in the mission without taking a train! It was nice to have a break from traveling for a while. This week was pretty good. Our sister missionaries both went home though. Last P-day we gave them a funeral, which was pretty fun. We had a eulogy and stuff, and made them a slide show using pictures sent to us by their old companions. It is pretty awesome to have iPhones here. 

      So we have a few weeks without sisters until next transfer, which will be in mid October. Elder Stafford and I are teaching some of the sisters´ investigators now. One of them is really great, and wants to be baptized in January. He could probably very easily be baptized earlier, but first he has to quit drinking coffee and taking snoos, which is like chewing tobacco but it comes in a packet and is really bad. But he is making a lot of progress with it.

     This week there was an international food festival in Sundsvall. On Tuesday we went there with the sisters before taking a bus to go meet one of their investigators that we teach now. Sister Barton got a kangaroo meat hamburger, which was interesting. She let us all take a bite. It didn´t taste too different from beef from what I could tell, but she had some very spicy peppers on it so it was hard to focus on the taste of the meat. Then Elder Stafford and I bought 3 pretzels: a salt one, a cheese one, and a pizza one. They were really good, but super filling, haha.

     Elder Stafford and I are teaching a family from Syria. We have had 3 lessons with them now. They have been reading the Book of Mormon and are pretty awesome. It is just sometimes a little hard to communicate with them, first of all because they don´t speak English very well, and then also because they are from a different culture so they see a lot of things in a different way. We have to be sure that they understand us completely. They really want to speak to an Arabic speaking church member, so we called the proselyting elders, who said they will ask President Beckstrand who will then contact other missions to find Arabic speaking elders who can skype our investigator family. It is pretty cool. 

     Yesterday in church it was the primary program. There are about 20 primary kids in our branch I think. They were pretty funny. Then I got to teach the Gospel Principles class about tithing. It was just the missionaries, the branch mission leader, and our investigator, so luckily I got to speak in English. I think it went pretty well. It helped me realize how many great things are done with tithing money, and why we pay tithing. It isn´t just so the church has money, but it´s to show our Heavenly Father that we are obedient and faithful and care about Him more than money. 

     Last night we went out tracting, and we were in an area where we haven´t been able to find the stairs to go to the upper floors of the apartments. But last night we found the stairs, and the second door we knocked on was an older Afghan couple. They didn´t speak English, so they led us to their neighbors who could translate. The neighbors were a young Afghan family, and the father translated for us. Pretty soon he invited us all in and we did what we call a "zero lesson", which is where we just explain what we do as missionaries and about what we hope for the investigators. We set up a time to come again and meet with them all. We have a few Persian speaking members in the area, so hopefully one of them will be able to come with us. 

     We have met a lot of pretty awesome muslim people here so far. It just makes me wish I could speak persian and arabic, haha. Maybe someday they will send persian speaking missionaries to Sweden. From what I hear, they would be busy. 

     Overall it has been a great week!

     I hope everyone is doing well and has a great week too!

   Elder Smith

Pictures:

1) Me being sleepy in the library while trying to study

2) Kangaroo hamburger with Elder Stafford and Sister Young

3) Saying goodbye at the train station (at 6am, so that is why I look tired)