Monday, May 24, 2010

The Nineteenth Letter

May 24, 2010
Dear Family,

Well, It's almost the end of May and time continues to pass by. It has been a little bit more of an eventful week for me here in KlaipÄ—da. I guess I will get right into in. On Monday we just did random stuff and checked out a few stores, but nothing exciting. Preparation Days just come and go so fast. On Tuesday, Elder Graham and I went to Kaunas so that we could pick up my visa. So I would ever have to leave the country I guess. My picture looks absolutely horrible on my visa. haha. So we had a three hour bus ride there and were there for about an hour and then had a three hour bus ride back and we had to go straight to teaching English class so we were in a hurry all day. It was kind of a crazy day. Wednesday, we just did normal finding things like contacting and knocking on doors and we found this old lady that we taught the lesson on the restoration to. She accepted it very well and we will be meeting with her again later this week. President Dance just made a new rule that Elders can't meet with ANY women of any age without a third responsible male. It used to be that we could teach women over forty, but he just changed the rule to never, so it is a lot harder to teach women at all. And a lot of the time they are the ones that are more willing to listen so it's tough. Especially since there are only like six male members that are active and only like two of them are willing to go teach with us. Anyways, so that just makes it harder for us. I think there have been some problems around the mission or something with Elders and younger girls their age. President Dance always does stuff for a reason. So that is that. Thursday we just did normal stuff and we taught English Class that night which went well. On Friday we did normal stuff and we had a lesson with a member whose name is Oleg. He is such a nice guy. He is Russian and doesn't speak Lithuanian so we just teach him in English. He is a navigator on ships here so he has to know English and he speaks really well, but it is still kind of broken. Anyways, he is really funny. I switched over to using a wet razor to shave and you all know how that goes. You cut yourself sometimes. :) So my face has had some cuts and some bad razor burn and every time we go over there he always tells me things that I can do different and has given me some face cream and stuff. He says that I have very beautiful skin and that I have to find the right stuff to shave with. So that is funny. And I also brought my pictures of the family over to show him because he had said that my family must look very beautiful so I wanted to show him. So he was looking through the pictures and he first saw one of Lara and Taylor's wedding pictures and said that they looked like movie actors and were from Hollywood, haha and then he saw a picture of Ben and said that he looks like Jesus Christ. haha it was funny how he said it because he was totally serious about it. I don't know how Ben looks like Jesus, but ok. So the rest of Friday we just did normal stuff. On Saturday we did the usual, but we contacted a guy on the street and we just sat down with him right then and taught him a lesson. He was really interested and we invited him to church and he actually came. It's not very often that that happens. But I think that he enjoyed it and we will be meeting with him this next week too. Sunday we also were knocking on doors and a younger couple let us in and we taught them the first lesson and they were really interested too. We have been trying really hard to find some new investigators and we finally found four this week so that has been a blessing. Things are a lot slower here in KlaipÄ—da than in Vilnius, but that is ok. I'm just glad that we were able to find some more people this week. Oh and on Saturday we also went and picked up trash around the beach. We try and do service about every other week just to change things up a bit and it was really nice. It's nice to get out and do some physical labor. So anyways, that was my week. It was good because we found some people that would actually listen to us, but it was also a hard week for a lot of reasons. It's always better when we are teaching though. That just doesn't happen all that much.

Love, Elder Leishman


131 days down, 599 days to go!