This week went pretty well! Last P-day we went to a big mall in a place called Birsta, which is only about 15 minutes from Sundsvall. It was fun to be in a mall that is very similar to American malls. We mostly went to clothes stores and looked at stuff. It was all pretty expensive though, and nobody needed anything bad enough to buy anything. But I think we are going to go back to that area today, because there is an Ikea that we need to go to, and there are a couple of other big stores that we want to go to. Also last Monday we went over to a member´s house for dinner and to plan an act for the upcoming branch talent show. The member´s name is Richard, and he was showing us youtube videos of what he wanted to do with us. It is called minister mime, or something like that. Basically, you paint your face white, and wear white gloves, and do interpretive dancing to gospel music. But the music has singing to it, so you do movements and facial expressions to match the lyrics. It´s going to be very interesting, haha. I´m not much of a dancer, so it will be a challenge. Also, Richard fed all the missionaries dinner, and it was an African food called fufu. It looks like mashed potatoes, but it is doughy. The way you eat it is that you roll some of it into a ball, about an inch in diameter, and you dip it into a spicy soup (luckily the soup he gave us was not hot spicy, just flavor spicy), then you put the ball in your mouth, and swallow. No chewing. Technically you can chew it, but it is supposed to just be swallowed. When I tried my first one, I wasn´t sure how I would ever swallow it. It looked pretty big. But then I put it in my mouth, and it went right down, haha. It was a really weird experience. It´s like trying to swallow a big vitamin. Elder Stafford had a hard time trying to swallow them, but he got it by the end.
On Tuesday, we woke up at 3:15 am to get ready to go to zone conference. Our train left at 5, but there aren´t any buses that leave that early, so we had to walk to the train station. Zone conference was really good though, so it was worth it. On the subway from the train station to the chapel I got to talk with Elder Bradley from my MTC group, so that was fun. The zone conference was mostly about how we need to teach people, not lessons. We talked about ways to plan a lesson specifically for the person we are going to teach it to. The lesson guides in Preach My Gospel are good, but we need to be aware of what our investigators need and what will help them progress the most. Then we took the train home. We got back to our apartment around 10:30 pm, so we were pretty tired, haha.
This week was Halloween! We didn´t really do anything special for it, haha. But we did go and buy some candy for ourselves. Halloween isn´t celebrated too much here. Me and Elder Stafford did some goal setting for the month of November, and we have decided that we are going to only speak Swedish this month. It´s going to be pretty hard, but I think it will be super helpful for me. We haven´t taught very many people that speak just Swedish, so I haven´t been using it as much as I should. So hopefully by the end of this month I will be a lot better at speaking and understanding Swedish.
November 1st was All-Saints Day, which is a Swedish holiday where people put candles on graves. So we went with the other elders to a big cemetery to see all the candles. It was really cool. I will include pictures of it if I can. Me and Elder Stafford forgot the phone cord, so we can´t upload pictures to the computer. But if the other elders come soon we can borrow their cord.
This week we had a couple of days that were super nice and sunshiney. But, the sun is going down faster and faster every day. Today the sun is supposed to set at 3:38 pm. It´s pretty crazy.
This week I have started reading Our Heritage, and me and Elder Stafford have been listening to some lectures about the Church´s early prophets. I think it is amazing how many people there have been who were so dedicated to the gospel and who sacrificed so much for their faith. It makes me realize that if we have faith we can accomplish great things and overcome whatever hardships come our way.
I hope everyone has a great week!
Elder Smith
No comments:
Post a Comment