Mar. 29, 2010
Dear Family, Well I have been out here for almost two weeks and I'm doing alright. This week has been very long! We work out every morning and even sometimes at night if we have time before we go to bed and we walk so much and I'm not used to getting this little sleep, I have been SOO tired! I knew that missionary work was going to be hard emotionally and mentally, but I wasn't expecting it to be this hard physically!! I'm so exhausted constantly and there is never a break either! haha I guess I don't have a choice though. I'm in a pretty good routine now so it feels like we do pretty much the same thing every day. Study in the morning, contacting on the street with breaks for lunch and dinner during the afternoon, and then knocking doors at night. Then we plan and go to bed and do it again! It's better than the mtc though cause we are talking to new people every day and new things happen. It's really nice to be right in center cause we're so close to everything! Like I said last week, I'm a block away from Gedimino so it's way nice. Our street is actually called Pamanceno so you can look it up on Google earth if you want!
I’ll tell you a little about my week. We do pretty much the same thing every day but I'll tell you about a few people we are teaching. One guy who's name is Joseph is a Catholic priest and he is way cool. He is way chill and loves talking with us. I don't think he will ever get baptized, but he really agrees with everything we teach him and he even takes notes on what we say! No one else does that. We taught him about the plan of salvation this week and he really liked what we said about life after death. He thought that it was so interesting! Anyways I’ve actually learned a lot about the Catholic Church by teaching him and it only makes me love our church more! But still it's really interesting to talk to him and I really enjoy it. He is originally from Brazil but he looks European. He speaks Portuguese, German, Italian, English, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Lithuanian and he says that Lithuanian is harder than all of those except Hebrew! haha thought you guys could brag about that one! Lithuanian is super hard! Some other things this week are that we had the baptism a week early for Lina and Adamas Sklutinas (The mom and the Son) and it went way good. They are a wonderful family and I’ve really come to love them. The daughter (Austeija) is getting baptized in a few weeks. She just wanted to make the choice to get baptized on her own and not be pressured by her family, but it will be really soon. Other than that, we are teaching a couple that are really cool. They ordered a Book of Mormon of the LDS website so we took it to them and they are really interested in the church. I'll let you know next week more how that is going. There aren't any other progressing investigators that we are teaching right now but we do teach about ten lessons a week but most of them don't want to keep meeting... ah, it's really sad sometimes cause I know that the gospel could help them so much in their lives! Anyways, things are good with my companion... He's a bit controlling so I don't like that but we get along better than my last companion and I did. He's a good guy and I'm learning a lot from him. The Language continues to be a constant struggle for me. It's very frustrating at times and very discouraging for me. It seems like there is so much to learn and so little time to learn it. They give us hardly any time to study and I’m so slow at learning things! So in a way it feels like I haven't learned much more than I did in the mtc but I know I have. It's just very overwhelming. Anyways, I didn't say much about my week, but there isn't much to say! Nothing very interesting happened. Just normal missionary work and talking to a ton of people! Oh to answer some of your questions, I did get a hand me down coat that fits me really well so I decided to hold off on getting a coat. I might get one next winter but not right now. I need to get going cause we are going to go spend the day in old town and go see everything which I'm pretty excited about. I'll take a bunch of pictures and send them next week! We're also going to have some Lithuanian food today which will be interesting. I've eaten with a few of the members and it's a little bit weird but it's ok. They eat pretty natural food and it's way healthy but it's interesting. The tea is the hardest thing to get used to. I still don't like it much at all! It's way bitter even when you load it up with sugar! Church is great here but even harder to not fall asleep cause I don't understand anything that they are saying so I zone out a lot. But the branch is way strong and it has some great members. I think I mentioned this in one of my emails, but there are a few ex-mafia members in the branch. Haha they are so cool and so into the gospel! One of them looks like the new James Bond and you really wouldn't want to mess with him. You don't see that in Utah very often! I'm going to come back from my mission and nothing is going to faze me! haha ok I better go but I'm so glad to hear that everything is going well at home. I'm so grateful for the constant support and love. I hope all is going well there. I love you guys so much and can't wait till I can bring you all here and show you around! It’s a beautiful place and these are great people! I love you guys so much!
Love, Elder Leishman
77 days down, 653 days to go
