This was a kinda weird week...
Mostly because of the state of mourning the whole country was in after the plane accident. But we did have some amazing stuff happen this week too.
Tuesday we went to Majdanek, the concentration camp here in Lublin. By "here in Lublin" I mean like in the city, there are houses and buildings just outside the border fences...really weird. Anyways, at the entrance there is this HUGE rock. It looks like it says something, but at the same time, you can't make out any letters...drove me nuts trying to figure out what it says. If anyone knows, please tell me. We walked around a took a lot of pictures, it is completely open and free so we got to see all the stuff, the concentration camp visits are always a somber experience. I can't even comprehend what happened there, especially standing in the room where thousands of people were shot against a wall before being burned. ;__; It is mind boggling. After that, we noticed a huge cemetary right next to the camp. So we went to visit. I have never seen so many gaves...It was absolutely massive. And all the graves were all decorated with flowers, not sure why, but they usually seem to be. (Mostly fake flowers though) Took a ton of pictures there too, nothing like that in the United States, at least not that I have ever seen.
After finally finding our way out of the cemetary, we had scheduled to meet with a man named Paul, who is an English teacher here in Lublin. I was excited because I was going to be able to speak in English :D We got there, and he told us that we could talk to his entire class if we wanted, he had already told them we were coming. We practically jumped out of our seats! What an opportunity. We taught a lot about the restoration and Joseph Smith. We also answered questions, like why we are here, and whether or not we are getting paid for what we do. Paul was fantastic, he has had missionary interaction before and was a great help and supporter of our church and what we teach. We also talked to them about the Word of Wisdom, and necessity of prophets. I was amazed at how carefully they listened to us! It was such a wonderful experience to have people actually eager to listen! We will be going back today :) I am super excited! They were assigned to go to the website we gave them and come up with some questions for us! It was wonderful, I wish everyone would listen to us like they did...
We witnessed a few miracles on Friday! We set out to go visit some people who were interested in the church a long time ago, we didn't have any of their phone numbers though, so we were just going to stop by to see if they were still there and maybe interested in meeting with us again. The first place that we visited no one was home, so we will have to go back later and check again. The second place we went was actually right by where we tracted that building last week. We found the apartment and we decided to just tract the stairwell, we started at the top...no one would let us in the building... Finally we reached the number of the place we came for. We rang and she picked up and we asked for the person we were looking for, but the lady told us they don't live there anymore. We were about to walk away but Elder Thomson asked if she would like to fill out a survey on happiness that we were doing. (That is usually how we can get people to let us into the building) She let us in! Turns out that she and her husband had moved there about a year ago. And she had just had a baby 3 weeks ago! How crazy is that. We had a great meeting with her, and she was super nice, and had pretty good questions and was willing to read all the pamphlets we left with here lol. Hopefully we can set up again with her sometime soon! Then later, while we were at another building where we had an address, we decided to tract the whole stairwell again, maybe with more luck this time. Started at the top at number 10. Got to 7 and the man let us in for the survey. He was nice and filled out our survey but in the end wasn't interested. Then we got down to door number 4. A lady answered the door and invited us in, low and behold she is a math tutor and was just at the end of a tutoring lesson. We talked to her for a while too, she had some fantastic questions for us! Hopefully we can set up with her again soon too! Then accross the hall from her, was the apartment we came for, number 3. We knocked and a young girl answered, of course the people we were looking for had moved... Actually never lived there... But the girl that answered was super friendly and seemed kinda interested :) really busy though, about to graduate college. We got her info and gave her ours, so hopefully that goes somewhere too! So much could come from this one day! I wish everyday were like this, it was nice to find some kind, nice people in Poland...
Saturday we had scheduled to have Branch activity. So we had to come up with some games to play for the actual activity. I introduced Elder Thomson to "The Tower of Flour" as I have thus named it. We got some chips and cookies, and gummy bears to use for my game instead of coins. We only had 4 total people show up... but it was still fun. Our Taiwanese members were loads of fun :D especially since they are both studying here to be doctors. I had to play a game where steadiness of hand is all that matters, against 3 people who want to be doctors....I only lost 2 times though :) It was a lot of fun. After we went to a nearby park and had relay races using a spoon and eggs :) I also brought the nerf football my parents sent and got to throw it around a bit, no one here knows how to throw it though lol.
Sunday was interesting because it was scheduled to be the funeral for the President. So we were told to only have Sacrament meeting this week. We had 3 people in church, 2 of which didn't speak Polish, and the other was Ukrainian who does speak Polish, Mira. It was an interesting experience... After church, since we couldn't really do much because everyone was waiting for the funeral. We decided to go to Old Town and take some pics since the weather was so nice. During our adventure we headed towards Lublin Castle and low and behold, they have huge T.V.'s set up and massive speaker system to broadcast the funeral. So we sat down on the stairs to watch it. It was 2.5 hours lol... I was baking in the sun...but happy I left my coat at the chapel. I actually got sunburned!!! on my face... It was really catholic, which was a bit odd, and it was in all Polish, so i didn't understand most of it. But the music they had for it was really pretty.
Monday, we spent most of the day doing financial work... It kills 1 day a week for us, which is terrible! We should be out looking for people, not paying bills and writing reports... oh well, it has to be done... Hopefully we can find a more efficient way to get it all done faster so we have some time to do other stuff too.
Well, last week was odd, but many blessings were involved as well! I am super excited to contact the people we found last week and hopefully set up more meetings with them.
Thanks for reading!!! I will be back next week, yet again. We have a Zone Conference on Friday this week. Should be great!
-Starszy Taylor
No comments:
Post a Comment